


Xun

by SinVraal



Series: Mass Effect: Kye Shepard's Story [5]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Gen, Gen Fic, Post-Game, Sci-Fi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-01
Updated: 2009-07-30
Packaged: 2017-10-10 12:01:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 31,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinVraal/pseuds/SinVraal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Normandy's outspoken pilot gets an unexpected run-in with the other side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Offense

Throughout his military career, there were few orders Joker had ever balked at executing. It had been with both pride and a certain grim pleasure that he'd skimmed Virmire's flak cannons and flown into Sovereign's teeth. But being ordered into a monkey suit and shuttled to a party full of officers and politicians was nearly beyond the pale.

Worse than that, Shepard had made him _shave_. "I look like I'm _twelve_," he'd complained sourly on the way up the elevator, rubbing his newly shorn jaw.

"You look fine," the commander had replied is a distracted tone. She wore black, a sleeveless top and flowing pants that hugged her hips but gave off the illusion of being a dress. Joker had a sneaking suspicion it was as close to a dress as Shepard was willingly likely to get.

Shepard had clearly bullied Alenko into a suit as well, though to Joker's profound annoyance, the lieutenant didn't seem particularly perturbed. In fact, he looked nauseatingly good in it. Then again, he didn't have to deal with either leg braces or crutches.

For the hundredth time, Joker wished Ashley were here. He'd had more than enough experience being a third wheel, and was in no rush to rack up more flight time behind that particular control console. Not that Shepard and Alenko's behavior was egregious in that regard, Shepard in particular seemed to be approaching the evening with the same frosty reserve she usually saved for meetings with the likes of Ambassador Udina. Alenko, perhaps out of habit, seemed to have adopted a similar mood, even if occasionally his eyes had a tendency to wander.

Joker decided early on that the liberal application of inebriates might make an evening of frippery more bearable. He scanned the attendees as he crossed the room, a wide, high-ceilinged room with many windows that looked out over the sprawling arcology of Hong Kong. It was the kind of crowd where you had to step lightly- some of the guests had come in their dress uniforms, but most were in formal civilian clothes.

As he moved, he could hear the faint whine of the power-assist servos in the braces that were clamped around his knees and legs. He still relied on his crutches to support the bulk of his upper body weight, but the braces, uncomfortable as they were, did help reduce fatigue over long evenings.

Based on the size and composition of the crowd, Joker morosely tried to calculate how many times he would have to explain the crutches. It wasn't that he didn't like parties, just that he didn't like parties full of egotistical strangers. This wasn't a get-together among friends, it was the kind of shin-dig that was thrown by rich people who wanted to rub shoulders with people who shouldn't otherwise care they existed.

Shepard was evidently one of those people, and very soon there was a constellation of curious people orbiting her. The commander wore a humoring smile that didn't quite reach her eyes, her demeanor suggesting that she considered this room to be every inch the battlefield Feros had been.

Joker made small-talk where necessary, appraising the guests with curious caution as he ambled between the food laid out on several tables and the chairs along the walls. There were deep layers of politics at work in the room, both military and civilian, and Joker was dedicated to the notion of steering as clear of it as possible. But the universe clearly had something else in mind. An hour into the evening, Joker found himself suddenly confronted by a trio of men. The evident leader was tall, wearing a dark suit which fit somewhat poorly over his muscled frame. His face was flushed, and he held a glass of dark alcohol negligently in one hand. A pair of friends hovered behind him in the all-too classic pose of the protective wingmen.

"_Normandy_, huh?" the man said, looking Joker up and down. "So this is the guy we have to thank for having to scrape body parts out of the Citadel Wards for a month?"

Joker's eyes narrowed. "I see my reputation precedes me," he quipped. "And you are...?"

"Thoreson, Second Fighter Squadron, _SSV Turing_," he declared, puffing out his chest.

Joker stifled a long-suffering sigh. He was never exactly sure what forces conspired to breed the kind of jock that seemed to gravitate to fighter piloting, but he had his theories. It seemed to be an unpleasant combination of testosterone-fueled enthusiasm coupled with an underdeveloped sense of teamwork and the lack of balls necessary to actually put boots on the ground.

The situation was already headed downhill. Joker's hard-won instincts kicked in- the best defense was to be as offensive as possible.

"I was following orders," Joker said coolly. "You know, that thing that happens when a superior officer makes a call? It should be an easy enough concept, even for a chimp like you."

"That Nuremberg crap won't fly with me!" Thoreson snapped.

"Oh, big word there," Joker said. "Don't hurt yourself, those two braincells have to last you all night!"

There was a twitter of laughter from behind them. The fighter pilot's eyes flicked past Joker's shoulder, and his face began to turn red.

"You little turd, I had _friends_ on those ships," Thoreson snarled. "They all died for what? So we could kiss the asses of a bunch of self-important _aliens_?"

Joker controlled the upsurge of anger with difficulty. He vaguely wished he could carry the now-classified recording of Sovereign's clear statement of intent with him, but even that would probably be lost on someone like Thoreson.

"I have an idea," Joker said, forcing an amiable tone through his fixed smile, "why don't you go explain your opinion to Commander Shepard herself? She's right over there, I'll introduce you!"

"You think I'm afraid of the Citadel's lackey?"

"In a word?" Joker shot back. "Yeah, I do. Why else would you be here beating your chest in front of a cripple? _She_ might actually put you on your ass."

Joker had always marveled at the way bullies seemed so deeply offended when their primary weapon was denied them. Thoreson's eyes bulged and his neck threatened to pop the top button of his shirt.

"But maybe you shouldn't risk it," he continued mercilessly. "I mean, Shepard's several times the man you are, your boyfriends here might go astray."

Joker never would have seen it, except that he happened to be looking at the right place at the right time. Thoreson was stepping forward, red-faced and intent, when a deft foot lashed out and hooked him around the ankle. As the fighter jock's eyes flew wide, Joker caught a brief flash of the man behind him slipping sideways behind Thoreson's friends.

The fighter pilot overbalanced and pitched forward, trying and failing to grab at Joker as he went by. There was a muffled crunch as he landed, and Thoreson let out a strangled squawk. He rolled sideways as if stung, and Joker caught the glint of little shards of glass sticking out from his chest from where he'd managed to land straight onto his drink.

One of Thoreson's wingmen whirled around, ready to confront whoever had tripped his friend, but all he found was a uniformed officer striding up to the group.

"Private Hanson!" The officer barked. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Rank stripes on the man's shoulder pegged him as a lieutenant commander.

Thoreson's friend stammered over an answer as the fighter pilot himself stared stupidly down at the seeping dark stain spreading from the flecks of glass embedded in his right pectoral muscle.

"I might have known," the officer continued darkly. "Thoreson! Get up! Hanson, Ramji, get him out of here!"

As the fighter pilots floundered, an outstretched tray appeared suddenly at Joker's elbow. He turned to see one of the waitstaff standing there, his expression diffident, a tray of wine glasses in hand. In a flash of recognition, Joker suddenly realized that only seconds ago, the waiter had been the one standing behind Thoreson.

"Thanks, man," Joker said, accepting a wineglass.

The waiter shot him an oddly knowing smirk before melting away into the crowd. Scratching his chin thoughtfully, Joker watched the three fighter pilots as they retreated. After a moment, he became aware of two people standing close by, looking at him. He turned toward them.

"What a nasty little man you are," the woman said with a wicked grin. She had large, penetrating eyes and a woven gold necklace. Two ivory-colored ornamental sticks crossed through the dark bun of her hair, pinning it in place.

"We all have our flaws," Joker said modestly. He appraised the pair with a raised eyebrow, braced for another battle.

"How dare you insult our comrade?" the woman said, her voice laden with vast insincerity. Then she glanced at her companion. "What do you think, Shakur, does that about cover our duty to support our crewmates?"

"You might be overstating the point a bit, even," Shakur replied with a nod. He was tall, with dark skin, close-cropped hair and an open, friendly face.

"_I_ thought so," the woman said, turning to Joker with a lopsided smile. "I always heard you were hot shit, _Normandy_. You dropped that lump without even firing a shot."

"I _am_ moderately stupendous," Joker replied, examining the swirl of wine in his glass.

"Thor's going to have some fun picking glass out of his chest," Shakur chuckled. "I wish I could be there."

"It was such a nice shirt, too," the woman said mournfully.

"Thor, huh?" Joker said.

"Oh yeah, he'd like to think lightning shoots out of his ass. But I think it's just that he snores like a thunderstorm," the woman said. She extended her hand to Joker. "Katherine Naciamento, _Turing _Third Fighter Squadron."

Joker shook her hand and returned the introduction.

"Thor's got the sensitivity of a hormonal moose, but he wasn't that far off base," Naciamento said, cocking her head. "A lot of us want to know... Was it worth it? Saving the Council?"

Joker exhaled and swept his gaze around the room. "Honestly?" he said after a moment. "I don't know. My CO seems to think it was, and she's usually got her head screwed on straight, but I guess only time will really answer that."

Naciamento smirked. "I guess that's as decent an answer as any."

Joker shrugged. "Pretty speeches aren't going to impress anyone, only what they do next. And they have an awful lot of lives to live up to."

"Amen," Shakur murmured.

Fighter pilots or no, at least they made for stimulating conversation. It was perhaps two hours later when something rippled in the hum of conversation, emanating from the far side of the room. Curious, Joker craned his neck around the group. Shepard emerged from behind a crowd of people, leading Alenko by the elbow. There was a silly smile plastered on her face, an expression so incongruous that Joker blinked in surprise. He excused himself and drifted in the direction of his crewmates.

As Joker approached, the commander glanced around, then her vapid expression evaporated. "You mind explaining to me what possessed you to mouth off to Captain Salih?" she asked Alenko through her teeth.

"I wasn't going to just stand there and take it!" the lieutenant snapped, none too gently retrieving his elbow from her grip. "I don't care how many medals he has, I don't know where he gets off saying crap like that about biotics!" He tugged irritably at the collar of his shirt.

"Did they put something in the water?" Joker inquired mildly. "Or is it just that expensive parties are a natural breeding ground for assholes?"

Shepard glanced in the pilot's direction, then scowled at Alenko, her eyes searching. "We're not going to reform the bigots overnight," she said, "especially by picking public fights with superior officers."

"Then what _are_ we here for? To look pretty?" Alenko shot back, his face a thundercloud. His eyes darted around the room. "When did it get so damn hot in here?"

Shepard looked at the lieutenant sharply.

"What have _you_ been drinking?" Joker asked. "I think the climate control is set on 'sub-arctic'."

The commander swore with enough virulence to peel paint. "We're leaving," she said crisply. "Come on, Joker."

"I'm not your damn dog," the pilot quipped, feeling a surge of disquiet.

"Now, _Flight Lieutenant,_" Shepard said in a tone that brooked no argument.

Joker shuffled after the commander, casting a suspicious glance over his shoulder. A few curious stares followed the three of them as they made their way out to the hallway, past the forest of ornamental plants to the bank of elevators. Shepard stabbed the call button, and after a few seconds one of the doors slid open. She ushered both Joker and Alenko through before following.

"Leaving so soon, Commander?"

Joker turned to see a man he didn't recognize standing in the doorway of the elevator, his foot across the threshold. He was young, with angular oriental features and dressed in a prim-looking dark blue suit.

"I have a busy schedule to keep," Shepard replied airily without turning around. "I'm sure you understand."

"Please reconsider..." the man said. Joker watched in grim fascination as the gun came up, a small pistol with an angled design that flared aggressively as the cowling retracted around the muzzle.

Joker's heart thudded, and he heard the shuffle of clothing as Alenko shifted his weight. Shepard turned, sweeping her gaze up from the gun with unhurried deliberation. The off-handed demeanor evaporated once again as she squared her shoulders, cutting down their attacker's angle to her crewmates, and fixed the man with a steely glare.

"I've seen scarier things than _you_ in my morning coffee," she said in a tone of towering contempt. "Why don't you run along and tell your masters I'm not playing their little game?"

The man's lips pulled back from his teeth in a smirk, one that didn't quite hide the nervous twitch of his eyes. The pistol was obviously not having the desired effect. "So sorry, Commander, I think you-"

Shepard exploded into movement, lunging toward the man with an outstretched palm. In one swift strike she grabbed the outstretched pistol and slammed the heel of her other hand into the man's nose. The weapon barked once as she twisted it out of the man's grip, and Joker lurched to the side reflexively as the round scattered high on the back wall of the elevator with a loud ping. Outside, their assailant was falling back, hands to his face, as the doors hissed smoothly shut and the elevator whined to life.

Joker forced himself to resume breathing, his heart slamming painfully in his chest. Shepard's mouth was a hard line as she gave the man's gun a cursory inspection, popping out the ammo slug and then slamming it back in.

"What... the hell?" Alenko asked. There was a hesitant hitch in his voice. He put his hand to his head, his brows furrowed.

"Trouble," the commander said crisply. "We're going to have to move quickly."

"I'm not all that good at running, you know?" Joker snapped. An unfamiliar, adrenal fear raced through his blood.

The commander glanced up at the floor display with narrow eyes. She stabbed a button on the display and the elevator decelerated rapidly. The doors hissed open into a wide, pillared room. Rows of sleek, arrow-nosed gravcars lined the walls.

Shepard turned to him. "How about flying?"


	2. Dive

"Now _That_ I can do," Joker said, trying to marshal the tattered edges of his usual air of casual confidence. "Which is yours?"

"Just pick one," Shepard said curtly.

Joker glanced at the commander in surprise, but decided there was no time to ask questions. He shuffled quickly down the line, scanning the gravcars with a practiced eye.

"What about that?" Alenko said, pointing.

"All sizzle, no steak," Joker dismissed it immediately. The lieutenant's choice was pretty to look at, to be sure. But the particular manufacturer made expensive cars for spoiled rich kids who wanted to look good and have the smoothest of rides when they tottered home blasted out of their minds after an evening out on the town. Joker had no interest in being coddled by the pushy VI it was no doubt loaded with.

"_Quick_-ly," Shepard said in a warning tone. She was looking back toward the elevator, watching the display over the door and fingering the pistol.

The pilot shuffled down the rows, examining the cars. Thinking rapidly, he narrowed potential choices down to ones he knew had powerful thrusters and sturdy frames. After a few seconds, he spotted the evidence he was looking for- low on the front end of one of the cars were the tell-tale holes of an after-market sensor package, and the maneuvering thruster ports had been widened. Someone who loved gravcars loved this car.

"This one," Joker said, walking up to his choice. It was a black Japanese-made sports model with a sculpted nose that bore the chips and scratches of a few years worth of high-speed use. "But now we just have to get in." He glanced expectantly at Alenko.

In a few short minutes, his friend had started looking shockingly worse for wear. A sheen of sweat covered his face, and he stood with hunched shoulders, his gaze flicking back in the direction of the elevator under lowered brows. A faint distortion hovered in the air around him, and his whole stance exuded dangerous tension. In a fleeting moment, Joker wondered if that was the image that haunted the minds of those who feared unstable biotics.

"I'll take care of it," Shepard announced.

The commander pushed past Alenko and her omni-tool display snapped open around her arm; the device's holo-display emitted from a deceptively ornamental bracelet. The model lacked the micro-fabricator unit of its military counterpart, but packed plenty of computing power. Joker peered curiously over her shoulder as Shepard entered a few commands and then laid her hand against the gravcar's door. There was a pause, then the door slid smoothly open.

"Why, Commander," Joker breathed with theatrical reverence, "where _did_ you get manufacturer's master override codes? Those aren't supposed to leave the factory..."

"Spectre toys," Shepard said. "I do have _some_ game, you know-"

She broke off as the elevator door suddenly slid open. Joker turned to see a bevy of dark shapes within, and the crack of gunfire echoed through the room. The three of them dodged between the cars as rounds whistled through the air.

"These people don't take no for an answer, do they?" Alenko growled. He clenched his fists and his body flared with writhing blue energy. "I'll-"

Shepard's arm shot out, jabbing Alenko sharply in the short ribs with outstretched fingers. He recoiled with a startled grunt, his biotic corona blowing out like a snuffed candle.

"Get in the car!" Shepard barked with a drill sergeant's imperative.

Without waiting, she backed up the order with a good shove, herding Alenko into the back seat as more gunfire sparked off the banked windshields of the nearby vehicles. Joker clambered into the driver's seat, shoving his crutches into the passenger side. The car rocked as he quickly fired up the a-grav drive and retracted the landing gear.

"Go!" Shepard shouted, firing through the door as it slid closed.

Without waiting, Joker fired the maneuvering thrusters and slid the gravcar out of its space, none too elegantly bulling past their attackers toward the open gate in the side of the structure. The car nearly clipped a support column as it burst out of the parking garage and Joker hissed in irritation. He'd grown used to larger ships- even with the _Normandy_'s oversized thrusters, the frigate didn't compare to a small high-performance gravcar, which handled more like a startled rabbit.

Manually flying most gravcars meant entering your flight license for validation. But whoever owned this particular vehicle had circumvented the validation protocol entirely, leaving it in manual mode by default. This was an unexpected bonus- Joker was in no real hurry to register his hard-won license to a vehicle that would shortly be reported stolen, regardless of the privileges accorded to the person currently sitting behind him.

Few people bothered getting an actual flight license. There was little point- for everyday use, a gravcar's internal VI was a far better driver than most humans, able to map and calculate its position relative to every other vehicle and building in the sky a thousand times a second. From a practical standpoint, it left the occupants free to do whatever they pleased during the trip. Getting licensed to manually fly a gravcar took a lengthy and expensive training course, and local governments went to certain lengths to encourage their citizens to let the cars do the driving- the computers tended to have a much better safety record.

Joker flew the gravcar down toward the travel lanes for general traffic, hoping to blend in with Hong Kong's busy skyways as fast as possible. He slipped into a level flight, all the while doing a quick rundown of the car's controls. He ignored the owner's custom presets and re-adjusted the console layout to suit his tastes, putting everything he needed within the span of his two hands. Some people still liked foot controls, but to Joker, there was something offensively primitive about flying with your feet.

The viewscreen was a wraparound, with an enhanced overlay that ghosted the buildings and vehicles in amber, distinguishing them easily from the nighttime background. A band along the top of the display showed the view from the rear of the car.

A scant few minutes passed before Joker spotted something in the rear-view that was subtly abnormal for standard, fly-by-VI traffic.

"Aaaand we've got company," he announced.

There was a shuffle, and Shepard clambered between the front seats, shoving his crutches to the floor and settling into the chair beside him. "How many?"

Joker squinted at the display. "Two, maybe three..."

"Lose them," Shepard said curtly.

"How _did_ I know you would say that?" Joker drawled, extending his hand. "Can I borrow the pistol for a sec?"

Shepard reversed her grip and handed him the gun with a puzzled glance. Joker palmed the gun and put the muzzle against the ceiling between them, mentally gauging the distance from the windscreen. He fired once, the sound bouncing loudly around the cabin. A red error indicator appeared on his display, proclaiming that he should return to dock at once.

"Thanks," he said, negligently tossing the gun back in the commander's lap.

"The hell was _that_ for?" she asked.

"We're not going to get far pumping out a transponder signal, are we?" Joker switched off the warning indicator. "If they're on our asses this fast, it means they're tracking us."

Given the status of this particular car's license validation system, there was probably a software kill to the transponder unit, too, but there wasn't really time to go hunting through the interface to find it. Evidently the car's owner liked his VIs the way Joker did- unobtrusive. Driving without transponder output was illegal, as gravcars relied on them to stay a safe distance away from each other. All gravcars were equipped with collision detectors, but those were less reliable at high speeds.

Wind whistled merrily from the hole through the roof and transponder broadcast antenna as the pilot heeled the gravcar to port and took off through the canyon-like city at speed.

"It's almost like you've done this before," Shepard mused.

"Just once," Joker replied absently, watching for their pursuers. "Do buckle up, Commander, I don't want extra limbs flying around my cabin while I'm trying to concentrate."

The truth was closer to twice, but Joker didn't really count the second attempt. He and his partner in crime, an old friend who fancied himself a hacker, had gotten so close to getting caught with the stolen vehicle that they'd scared themselves straight. There had been much talk and boasting about 'next time', but in time they'd both conveniently forgotten about it.

Two gravcars pulled into view behind them. They flew staggered, one high, one obviously trying to blend into the visual noise of the city around them. Joker amused himself by testing their reflexes, weaving and faking a few turns. They seemed unfazed and followed doggedly as he wove through the buildings, though the high-running car was the slower of the two to react.

A harsh voice suddenly blared over the gravcar's speakers, barking commands in Mandarin, before switching to Cantonese and English. Joker instantly recognized the unmistakable robotic voice of the Hong Kong police drones, overriding their comm system with a tightbeam transmission.

"Oh, great," Joker muttered. "What a night to be on the ball, guys."

He spotted the two tiny shapes in the rearview as they jetted in pursuit of the car chase. As a concession to a populace uncomfortable with the notion of armed VIs, they carried no weapons, but they were a beacon to any number of very human cops. The only consolation was that the police drones were as much a threat to their pursuers as to the _Normandy_'s wayward crew.

Joker's pursuers, for their part, were apparently disinclined to risk the drones' presence. Suddenly there was a flare in his rear-view display, and a sparkle of light flashed off of breaking glass high and ahead of them. The drones' automated voices barked shrill warnings about illegal weapons fire. As if in answer, one of them sparked and exploded.

"That's cheating!" Joker snapped. He banked into a hard turn, trying to break the line of sight. "Bringing onboard guns to a race... Who did you piss off, Commander?"

"Cerberus, I think. They're inconsiderate that way," Shepard replied tersely.

"Cerberus..." the pilot said. "Fantastic. I thought you put these guys out of a job? Deprived most of them of their lives?"

"While we're in the land of Greek mythology, this hydra has many heads."

"You might have warned me, you know? 'By the way, Joker, someone might try to kill you tonight'. See? Is that hard?"

"I didn't think they'd show up with bells on," Shepard retorted. "And I did tell you to keep your eyes open, didn't I?"

Joker heeled the gravcar again. "I thought you meant for fashion faux pas and bad politics, not treasonous conspiracy nutjobs!"

There was another flare behind them as the pursuing car's mass accelerator machine gun clipped the second police drone, and the small robot disintegrated.

"This _is_ politics, can't you tell?" Shepard said with annoying levity. "I have unshakable faith in you, Joker."

"Spiffy," the pilot grouched.

Without weapons of any kind, there was no way to get the drop on his attacker, which left him with one option. He pulsed the main thrusters, pushing the gravcar faster. The buildings around them began to blur, and the enhanced image on the viewscreen stuttered as it strained to keep up with the shifting landscape.

The VI-controlled gravcars could largely be relied upon to stay within their assigned lanes, but all it took was one wayward traveler, one surprise buttress in the soaring, interconnected structures to ruin his course.

Still, there was something untouchably pure about these moments. Joker could privately admit that they were frightening, in an abstract kind of sense, but the fear was distant. A few minutes had given Joker a feel for the car's personality, and as he spread his fingers over the control console, he could imagine himself submerging into the machined perfection of the craft, feeling its every breath and heartbeat. The focus came easily. The world narrowed to the view ahead, to the instant assessment of obstacles. His touch was feather-light; the merest burst of the maneuvering thrusters at such speeds translated into a violent course correction.

He could never guess how long these moments lasted, in everyone else's reality. The city, the world, the entire universe was a vanishing blur.

"Boom," Shepard said quietly from beside him, penetrating his reverie.

Joker risked a glance at the rearview. "You sure?"

"At least one-"

The gravcar suddenly shuddered, dipping violently. Shepard whipped around as Joker's console lit up and the pilot reflexively stabbed the ventral thrusters to keep them from falling out of the sky. Joker glanced back and saw tendrils of blue-black distortion flicker through the air. Alenko was hunched over, his hands clamped around his head. An agonized, strangled moan escaped him.

"What the hell...?" Joker grated, wrestling with the controls.

The commander was stretched between the seats, talking quickly and quietly to the lieutenant. Joker kept his mind on keeping them airborne, pushing away the stunned realization that it was his friend's uncontrolled outburst that had been strong enough to interfere with the vehicle's a-grav field. After a few interminable seconds, the field stabilized.

"Are we good?" Joker asked.

"Bad time for a migraine..." Shepard said as she glanced back. Joker sensed she almost said more, but her jaw clenched in a hard line.

The pilot could hear Alenko's harsh breathing. Behind them, their pursuer swung into view, a dark blot against the enhanced image of the background. On instinct, Joker pulsed the maneuvering thrusters, weaving the gravcar as scattered impacts flashed along the walls of the surrounding buildings.

"I think we just officially graduated from 'catch' to 'explode'," Joker said absently.

They had another problem- at the speeds they were flying, they were rapidly running out of city to hide in. Neither the open harbour nor the mountainous land that ringed the arcology would provide them much cover from their pursuer's guns. The pilot knew he was going to have to get creative.

The real trick involved in flying a vehicle using the mass effect field was to let go of the natural preconceptions of mass and momentum. Anti-gravity drives produced handling that was in truth closer to space flight, where lift surfaces like those of original flying vehicles were irrelevant. The only thing that remained a factor in atmosphere as opposed to the void of space was wind resistance.

Real skill, on Joker's estimation, wasn't merely getting the vehicle to its destination- it was the deep understanding of the sometimes esoteric behavior of mass and kinetic energy, and the willingness to tap into the many ways the a-grav drive interacted with the thrust mechanism. Figuring out new ways to pull extreme maneuvers while not crushing the occupants to paste and shearing the vehicle in half was Joker's holiest of Grails.

The gravcar swerved and the ground beneath them suddenly gave way to several stories of emptiness. Joker smirked to himself, then neutralized the a-grav field. All at once, the car's real mass re-exerted itself, and gravity reached up with eager hands to snatch the vehicle. He heard Shepard's breath catch as they plummeted into a steep parabolic dive.

Stories of gleaming arcology towers whipped past the windows. In the viewscreen's enhanced image, Joker spotted a series of horizontal spars that stretched between the buildings ahead and below. Squinting at the display, his mind raced to calculate a path through the obstructions.

Grinning gleefully through clenched teeth, Joker waited for the last possible second before punching the car's fore thrusters. The short burst arrested their forward momentum just enough that a huge spar whipped past the nose of the plummeting vehicle, heart-stoppingly close.

In the same motion, the pilot re-engaged the a-grav field and gunned the thrusters, sharply pulling up the dive. At the same moment that their accumulated kinetic energy from the dive should have been crushing them into their seats, the tricky magic that was the mass effect sapped that energy away as it neutralized the car and its occupants' mass. The vehicle's frame creaked in protest to the shearing, contradictory forces, but stayed whole as they arrowed out from under the looming structure.

Joker glanced at the rearview display just in time to see the flaming explosion as the Cerberus gravcar failed to negotiate the spar, finding its end in the spectacular flare of thruster fuel and mass field failure.

"You lose," the pilot murmured with grim exultation.

As he scaled the gravcar's speed back to something less obviously illegal, Shepard unlatched her seat belt.

"Nice flying, Lieutenant. Head to Kowloon," she said as she clambered awkwardly between the seats into the rear.

"Aye aye," Joker said, settling back into his seat. "What's in Kowloon?"

"Safehouse," Shepard said shortly from behind him.

Staying low, Joker maneuvered the gravcar out over the waters of Hong Kong's bay, the so-called Fragrant Waters that were the city's namesake. The towers of the sprawling arcology glittered off the agitated waters, and wind buffeted the small craft. He followed Shepard's curt directions deep into the sprawling residential neighborhoods of Kowloon.

The buildings they eventually pulled up to were notable only in their similarity to everything around them, which, Joker supposed, was the point.

As Shepard maneuvered the miserable lieutenant out the back, Joker did a cursory check for travel logs, but found none. He retrieved his crutches and eased out the door. Reaching down to the control console, he tapped in the command the car had been demanding since the transponder had failed.

The pilot stepped back as the door slid shut. "Thanks for the ride, babe," he said with a loving pat to the car's roof. "You were great. Sleep tight, now."

The vehicle rose into the air with stately deliberation, then turned toward home. Wherever that was.


	3. Bias

The pilot knew right away something was wrong. He only absently noted the dim passageway that led to one of what seemed like hundreds of identical doors in the huge residential structure. Each door was numbered, but otherwise there was little of note in the cavern-like hall aside from the occasional pair of shoes, and - perhaps ironically - a wizened-looking plastic plant.

Led by the commander, Alenko stumbled a lot, trembling visibly as little shocks of dim blue distortion traveled about his limbs like agitated phantoms. Joker knew Alenko was prone to migraines, had been around when the lieutenant had suffered them. He seemed used to it, quietly resigned to his hardship in a way Joker sympathized with. A certain tightness would develop around Alenko's eyes, then usually he just grumbled something about auras before retreating to his pod or the med bay.

But Joker had never seen the lieutenant act like this before. The tension in his gut mounted as Shepard stopped at one of the numbered doors and entered a perfunctory code. Opening with a grinding sound, the portal led right into a kitchen and dining space, lit by yellowish ceiling lamps. There was a small living room next to it, and a short hallway. The air smelled of stale disuse.

Joker had never really been exposed to biotic powers- the rare few who joined the Alliance weren't 'wasted' on naval positions. Various anecdotes reported that many of them never missed an opportunity to show off their special skills, but Alenko was quite the opposite. There were few things in life that could honestly be said to arrest Joker's outspoken personality, but one of those was a strong aversion to treating a friend like a circus sideshow. He was curious, to be sure, but the lieutenant seemed disinclined to talk about it casually, and the pilot had no interest in pressing the issue. Perhaps it was the development of an unspoken understanding between them that the two men treated each other as just that, even though neither could claim to be normal.

But curiosity lingered still, mingled with concern, and so Joker trailed along after Shepard as she led Alenko through the tiny kitchen and down the hall to a bedroom. It was sparsely appointed, with bare walls and a shuttered window.

Shepard talked to Alenko in reassuring tones, but he seemed to be getting increasingly agitated. Something about the cadence of his voice seemed off to Joker, in a way the pilot couldn't quite put his finger on. Suddenly the lieutenant shoved Shepard away.

"Why aren't you listening to me?" Alenko demanded, backing into the room. "I... I can't do it."

Shepard cocked her head. "Do what? Look-"

"What is this?" the lieutenant said, looking wildly around the room through squinted blood-shot eyes. "Why can't I just go back to A-4? Is... is this another test?"

"No... Kaidan, it's okay, just calm down," the commander said, her voice betraying mounting confusion. "It's just friends here."

"Who the hell are you?" Alenko rasped. His harsh breathing hissed between his teeth.

Shepard's face fell. "W- What?" she said in a stricken voice. She stepped forward, spreading her arms. "Kaidan, it's me-"

"Get away from me!" Alenko roared, throwing his arm out in a wide arc.

Joker had certainly seen mass effect fields before, but never this intimately. The air seemed to bulge as the wave of distortion traveled outward, rippling blue. Gravity betrayed him, slewing sideways in a sensation that was sudden and wildly disorienting. Joker had experienced changes in gravity on board ship, but they were controlled, and he had ample incentive to be sure his fragile butt was firmly strapped into a chair whenever it happened.

A kind of raw fear clutched the pilot, the voice of every nightmare he'd had about an a-grav field malfunction. Reflexively, he grabbed the jutting frame of the inset drawers and clung to it for dear life as his feet lifted off the ground and his body slammed hard into the wall. He heard a crash and bang of metal, and the lights flickered.

The distortion passed quickly. As his feet found the ground again, Joker opened his eyes, still supporting himself with his arms by the drawer frame. At the far end of the room, Alenko stood fixed and staring, his mouth half open. For a terrible second, Joker really thought Alenko would kill them both. But suddenly, the lieutenant's enraged expression crumpled, and he seemed to fold in on himself, reaching up to clutch his head as he backed into the far corner and slumped to the floor.

"Uh, Shepard?" Joker said tentatively, not really taking his eyes off the lieutenant. He could hear Alenko mumbling to himself, a disjointed string of miserable apologies and names Joker didn't recognize.

There was a grunt from the far side of the bed, and the commander appeared, doggedly pulling herself up. She wagged her head a few times, shaking herself as she looked around. She shifted her shoulders with a brief pained expression as she padded toward the pilot.

"Joker, you okay?" she asked in a low voice.

"That wasn't fun," Joker quipped. "I think I've decided I don't like flying unless _I'm_ the one controlling it."

"Lucky for us, that wasn't a very focused hit." The commander bent down and retrieved his crutches. "You should go," she murmured, holding them out.

"Uh, yeah, no _kidding_." He took the crutches and edged out the door.

He made his way to the cheap-looking metal dining table in the kitchen and eased himself into one of the chairs. A sullen ache settled into his shoulder from hitting the wall. After a few minutes, he realized he was staring down the hallway at the door and tore his gaze away. He looked down at his hands, spread out on the table, and went through a little mental ritual that had been habit years ago, running through the evening's events and making himself feel grateful for the fact that none of it had resulted in broken bones. There was a time when he would repeat such an exercise at the end of every day, but he'd come to consciously reject it. It reminded him too much of living under his parents' overprotective thumbs.

At length, the adrenaline of the past hour drained away into weariness. He shrugged out of the suit jacket and put his head down onto his arms. Sometime later, he jerked out of a half-doze when he heard a door open, and Shepard came down the hall. She stopped at the entrance and leaned against the wall, her face blank.

"All quiet on the front lines?" Joker ventured.

"I managed to convince him to take something for the migraine, and he finally fell asleep."

"Was he still... confused?"

"Yes," Shepard replied, voice flat.

Joker drummed his fingers lightly on the table, unsure of what to do. Shepard's numb expression was unnerving. He had a certain idea of what must be going on underneath it, but was at a loss for anything to do that might help. Shepard was his CO, the bastion of cool that was always supposed to know what to do.

"Shouldn't we go to a hospital or something?" he asked after a moment.

A grimace flickered across her face. "We can't risk it. They're waiting for us. If he hurts even one person..."

Joker opted for another tactic. "Okay, is this where you tell me what the hell is going on?" The question came out harsher than he'd intended, but part of him wanted to get a rise from her.

Shepard exhaled, then came over to the table and sat down heavily. "Have you been watching the news lately?"

"No, I do my best to ignore the outside world," Joker replied with thick sarcasm, "it's bad for my complexion."

Shepard ignored the snark and continued. "Then you may have seen the report that came out about a month ago, about the biotic in Sao Paulo that killed three people?"

"Uh, I think so... L2?"

"No... 3. The autopsy report concluded he had a psychotic break, possibly linked to interference from his implant."

"I thought L3 technology was supposed to be stable," Joker said, frowning.

Shepard's eyes narrowed. "Then two weeks ago, it happened again. Beijing. L3, PLA specialist. Six dead. Official autopsy reports the same pathology as the Sao Paulo episode."

"Official..." Joker repeated with a twist to his mouth. He was starting to see where this was going. "And unofficially?"

"We finally got our hands on the _real_ report three days ago. The man was loaded up with a massive dose of narcotic, some hybrid of Red Sand and amphetamines. We had some people look at the chemical breakdown, and it wasn't a recreational mix. It was specifically engineered to provoke aggression. We did some digging, and there were three other incidents before the Sao Paulo one that might be related. They didn't get much media play because they didn't result in deaths, but the MO seems to be the same. They may have been Cerberus' test cases."

"Who's 'we'?"

"A small group of internal affairs and Ns."

Joker frowned, absently scratching his abnormally smooth chin. "Okay. Is Cerberus trying to discredit the L3?"

"Think bigger," Shepard said. "A few news cycles of this, and it's the perfect time for certain Alliance brass to trot out their new biotics regulations, and encourage member nations to adopt the same measures. Maybe you didn't hear about it, because it doesn't really affect you, but every human biotic with any sense is paying attention."

The pilot was silent for a long moment. "They're spiking the punch, aren't they," he said finally. "Trying to bias public sentiment so they can get their legislation through."

"It isn't hard," Shepard said, an edge of bitterness in her voice. "The truth doesn't sell as well as the fiction. The worst thing is, they're also making good biotics doubt _themselves_. I can tell you first hand- the fear for your own sanity can be insidiously poisonous. It's this kind of toxic bullshit that's infecting people like Major Kyle, driving the wedge in deeper every day."

"I don't get why Cerberus would be putting resources into making laws against biotics. I thought they were all _for_ biotics."

"They're all for _controlling_ us," Shepard corrected. "Anything that divides us from the general human population serves their purpose- they want us registered and weaponized. Us against them. Can you imagine it? A kid the same under the law as a military-trained commando? Throw a punch at someone in a bar, and go to jail for felony assault with a deadly weapon, just because you have an implant? And if they rile up negative public sentiment enough, then whatever Cerberus itself offers a biotic is going to seem appealing."

Joker considered it for a moment. "And tonight could've been their coup de grace, too. Big party of rich people and Alliance brass, and a famous and notoriously stable L2 flips out and makes a mess..."

Shepard nodded, nostrils flaring with barely suppressed rage. "Godammit, I was so sure that if they tried anything, they'd come after _me_," she growled.

"Huh?"

"We weren't sure if they'd try anything at all tonight. But..." she stopped and swallowed hard. "When they played their hand we were all looking in the wrong bloody direction," she said finally.

Joker shifted uncomfortably, keenly aware of the titanic effort Shepard was putting into clamping down on herself. "Well... you can't take on the dreadnought 'til you clean up the fighter escort."

Shepard fixed him with a narrow-eyed glare.

"Better him than you, really," he continued blithely, "Alenko's wound up so tight he probably follows orders even when he's drugged out of his tree."

The stare turned flintier, and for a moment it looked as if Shepard seriously contemplated how much inconvenience it would be to discreetly dispose of one brittle-boned corpse. At length, she pushed herself up from the table and turned away.

"Get some rest," the commander said. "Backup will be here in a few hours."

It wasn't much, but at least there was some steel back in Shepard's voice. Joker watched as she stumped into the living room and threw herself onto the smaller of the two threadbare couches, curling up in an unhappy-looking ball.

He sighed, a long and silent exhalation. It was going to be an uncomfortable night.


	4. Civilized

As Joker predicted, the couch wasn't particularly comfortable. He woke up several times with part of his body complaining painfully, and would shuffle around before drifting back into a restless sleep. Finally, the insistence of a full bladder forced him back to wakefulness.

Morning light filtered into the room under the shutters on the window. The pilot glanced around the room and saw Shepard still curled up and asleep. Sitting up, his gaze fell on the black skeletal outline of his leg braces. He sighed. In his stubborn decision to forgo a mobile chair of some kind, he'd been forced to concede to the near-constant use of the braces, which tended to chafe after a few hours. He was still sore from the previous night. If nothing else, entire shifts in a pilot's chair meant freedom from the mechanized things for stretches of time.

With sullen resolve, Joker fed his legs into the braces and tightened them. Stifling a groan at the knot in his back, he retrieved his crutches and pulled himself to his feet. Groggily, he shuffled across the room and out into the hallway, and paused. It was empty, but the door at the end of it bore an ominous air in the dim light. Suddenly apprehensive, Joker sidled up to the gaping bathroom door and peeked in, but found it empty as well.

The bathroom was inconveniently cramped, but Joker managed to negotiate it without mishap. As he stepped out, something loomed in the corner of his eye. Joker jumped, lurching back into the doorway.

"Joker?"

Leaning on the door frame, the pilot craned his head around and saw Alenko standing there. There was a long moment in which they stared at each other, the pilot expecting that baleful corona to flare up at any second. But the anger was gone from his friend's face, replaced by an expression of bleary-eyed confusion.

"Morning, sunshine. You look like crap," Joker observed, trying to force his heart to slow down as he stepped back into the hall. Even as he was relieved to see his friend whole, he couldn't miss the opportunity to needle Alenko about appearance. The lieutenant had a streak of vanity that was perhaps unusual for someone whose idea of a fun afternoon involved being up to his elbows in engine parts.

"Gosh, thanks. Can't imagine why," Alenko said sarcastically, raking his fingers through his messy hair. "I feel like a colony of borer weevils has taken up residence in my frontal lobes. Mind telling me what the hell is going on? Where are we? Where's Shepard?"

"She's here." Joker regarded the other man curiously. "What's the last thing you remember?"

Alenko frowned, rubbing his forehead. "Getting in the car, there were guys shooting at us...? I think. I don't remember coming _here_... What happened?"

"Oh, you got completely trashed and made a pass at Admiral Takahashi's wife. It was fantastic, he sicced the MPs on us and everything..."

The lieutenant's eyes narrowed. "Joker..." he grated between his teeth.

"Cerberus spiked your drink," the pilot said hastily. "They tried to goad you into some public fireworks."

"Fireworks...?"

"Yeah, the second story isn't much fun either, is it? Unfortunately it's true. Seems like Cerberus has been drugging biotics and trying to get them to make a public mess."

The lieutenant's frown deepened. He flexed his hands as if trying to force memories to return.

Joker shifted to stretch the persistent knot. "Shepard picked up on it and bailed us out before anyone noticed anything. The drug did something funny to you, though, I think your brain sort of fritzed out for a while there. You were babbling some nonsense about A-4 tests and amusing yourself by flipping over the furniture."

"A..." Alenko swallowed hard. "I didn't... hurt anyone, did I?"

"Nothing major." The pilot shrugged negligently, sensing dangerous waters.

Joker was standing close enough to see the blood drain out of his friend's face. The lieutenant was either remembering something of what had happened, or was naturally assuming the worst. The pilot rather suspected the latter.

"She's _fine_," the pilot said.

Alenko's mouth worked in soundless consternation as he looked back toward the bedroom.

"C'mon, let's go get breakfast," Joker suggested abruptly.

"I... What?"

Joker prodded Alenko with a crutch, herding him toward the exterior door. "Our fearless leader needs her beauty sleep, and I need some air."

"We shouldn't-"

"You're not gonna let little old creaky-legs wander around Kowloon alone, are you?" the pilot said innocently. "Don't worry, I'll leave a note."

In Joker's shrewd understanding of military minds, most soldiers responded to stressful situations best when given something to do. This was one of those times when Joker thought it perfectly reasonable to exploit this training. It succeeded at least in getting his stricken friend moving, if not distracted from his thoughts.

They back-tracked the short elevator ride and the trip down a covered walkway they had taken the night previous, during which Joker took a moment to tap out a quick message to Shepard on his personal omni-tool.

_Everything's fine. Gone for breakfast, back soon. -J_

They emerged from the warren-like passages into a sunny spring morning, the view ahead spreading into the sprawl of the island city stretching up into the blue sky across the bay.

"Where are we going?" Alenko asked in a weary voice.

"I don't know," Joker answered cheerfully. "I'm sure we'll know when we get there. That's what makes it fun!" He chose a direction on the street and started off.

Hong Kong had been one of the first major arcology projects in the world; a massively ambitious plan on the part of the Government of Hong Kong to revitalize the flagging island metropolis and rescue it from the encroachment of the rising seas. The waves of economic trouble brought on by the environmental damage to the planet had battered the city as surely as the vicious weather. But the city survived, as it always had, on continuous re-invention and a mercantile tradition unrivaled by any other nation.

Unshackled from roadways, gravcars were long since banished to the skies, leaving the curving multi-level promenades entirely to foot traffic, electric scooters and the occasional bicycle. Along the upthrust buildings, brightly-colored holographic billboards clamored for attention. Occasionally, fully animated holo-people would spring from the sidewalk and address a passerby directly, having scanned their faces and clothes for hints as to what product might interest them.

Intrusive advertising and pressing crowds aside, Joker had an abiding love for the city. The sheer number of people was intimidating for someone as physically fragile as he, but he'd always gotten a certain wanton thrill from testing his mettle in a place where a random elbow could be disastrous. His parents had done their best to cloister their brittle-boned son, only to foster in him a secret, irrepressible desire to attempt the things he shouldn't.

But it was something else, too. If you were in space, it was either because you could afford to be there, or because you were in the Alliance military. In both cases, it probably meant you'd had some kind of gene therapy, either the standard-issue military enhancements, or voluntary ones both practical and aesthetic. If you didn't like your shape, you could tweak your metabolism, and undesirable traits could be adjusted or completely rebuilt. The end result was that after a while, it seemed everyone in space started to look the same.

Hong Kong was brimming with all sorts of people, however, many of whom were aggressively, often gleefully different. Those who couldn't afford to leave Earth went about their business next to others who were too busy with the business of living to be bothered with expensive vanity. Body shapes, ages, races and faces ran the gamut, lacking that certain artificial sameness that crept into the ranks of the wealthy.

In short, it was one of the few places he knew of where he felt he fit right in.

Joker made his way down the sweeping avenue, curiously watching the crowd. It was still early; most people were engaged in their morning routine and ignored the two men. Alenko ambled along beside Joker, his expression distant. The pilot had an unspoken appreciation for the lieutenant's ability to not only keep pace with someone on crutches, but to not show any sign of annoyance about it.

Somewhere in the press of gathering crowds, they paused to let a group pass on a cross street, and suddenly something bumped into Joker from behind. The pilot braced himself defensively, turning to see who had been so inattentive. There was a huff of air and a clicking sound, and Joker looked down, startled, into the round personage of a volus.

"So sorry, Earth-clan!" the alien exclaimed through a vocalizer hidden somewhere in the front of his facemask. "A thousand apologies, I was distracted."

Somewhere well short of a meter and a half in height, the alien was clad head to toe in the bulky environment suit similar to what Joker had seen on Doran, the owner of Flux, and other volus on the Citadel. But where their suits were utilitarian, this one looked brand new, a slick dark blue with silver accents.

"No worries. You look lost, my friend," Joker ventured as Alenko came up beside him. It was a guess, since the volus' face didn't look like much of anything hidden as it was under the environment suit's face-mask. The pilot had always found it amusing that their illuminated eyepieces were set to 'blink', presumably in time to their real eyes.

"Well... well now, quite right I suppose," the rotund alien replied, his sculpted jowls wagging along with his head as he spoke. He drew himself up to his full inconsiderable height and extended a stubby arm to Joker. "I am Gan Andow of the Jendin Banking Clan. Pleased to meet you, Earth-clan."

The pilot had to stifle a chuckle at the well-practiced but stilted greeting. Recent experience and an Academy class on alien relations hadn't done much to dull Joker's sense that the volus had been added to the galaxy for everyone else's amusement. Passersby watched the alien with open curiosity as they went by.

"Uh, hi, I'm Joker." The pilot took the three-fingered hand, and Gan shook it enthusiastically.

Alenko said something unintelligible, his brows furrowed in concentration as he carefully enunciated the words.

The volus blinked, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Delightful to meet such civilized clansmen!" he said effusively, his short arm shooting out in Alenko's direction. The lieutenant took the proffered hand and had it vigorously pumped by the diminutive alien.

"Well now, yes, I am somewhat lost," Gan said, hooking his thumbs into the broad belt that orbited the equator of his massive belly. "I've been admiring the sights of this most interesting city! But I seem to have lost track of the transit station."

Interesting as Kowloon could be, Joker found it odd that anyone would consider a residential neighborhood to be 'one of the sights'. Then again, the most alien of worlds he'd ever been to personally was the Citadel, and he was forced to admit it had been difficult not to just stand around and gawk at the architecture. Joker's medical problems had made him noticeably shorter than the average man, so he had a certain wry appreciation for what it must be like to spend time among a species of giants.

"Well, we were just headed that way, if you'd like to join us," Joker offered. He had no idea where the nearest transit station was, but they were bound to spot one soon enough, as they were speckled liberally throughout the multi-level city.

"Capital!" Gan declared.

As they set out, the volus launched into an enthusiastic appraisal of the city and it's denizens between huffs of air from his breathing apparatus. Joker could follow the conversation fairly well until it evolved into a rambling deconstruction of humanity's economy, at which point Gan's thought processes were headed into territory too esoteric for the pilot.

"I say," Gan asked suddenly, "did something untoward happen to your legs?"

Joker looked sidelong at the volus. He felt his hackles go up, but it was strangely hard to get angry at the stout little alien, who stared back with his faceplate's round-eyed, gormless vacuity.

"You could say that," Joker replied. "I... ran afoul of some less than savory types."

Gan made a disparaging noise. "Ah, villainy!"

"I wasn't fast enough to repay certain... outstanding debts. The debtor got a little rough with his reminders."

"Shocking!" Gan exclaimed.

"Oh, yes," Joker agreed, warming up to the tale. He pointedly ignored the sarcastic cough from Alenko. "As if that weren't enough, last night I was out at a party and they stole my gravcar right out of the garage!"

"_Terribly_ unprofessional," the volus said, wagging his head. "There are _proper_ ways one deals with these things!"

"I doubt they see it that way, they sent the car back with a hole in the roof, probably, you know, as a warning..." Joker cast the alien a conspiratorial glance.

Oblivious, Gan waved his claw-like hand. "Well now, there's really no call for such _barbarism_. Why didn't they seek recourse? Seizure of liquid and personal assets, surely, to begin with..."

"I really couldn't say..." Joker said vaguely.

"Of course, of course, writs of non-disclosure all around, I'm sure," the volus said with a vigorous nod.

Joker felt a nudge and glanced back to see Alenko jerk a thumb down the side street. The pilot stood straight enough to spot the familiar sign over the heads of passengers coming in and out. He flashed the lieutenant a quick grin.

"This way, mister Andow," Joker said sunnily. "The station is right over there."

"Capital!" Gan said. "Well now, mister Joker, we must part company. But should you ever find yourself in need of monetary services, you must be sure to send me a message! I'm quite sure I could do a better job of it than whomever made such a sad tangle of yours." With a flourish, he produced a small rectangle of thin plastic and handed it to Joker.

With a torrent of effusive thanks and a round of enthusiastic arm pumping, the round alien finally turned and trundled off toward the transit station. Joker watched him go, bemused by the strange encounter.

"You're a piece of work," Alenko said dryly.

"Ah, just having a bit of fun," Joker drawled as they started off again. "What does _he_ care? I just couldn't resist that ridiculous translator."

"Now how am I supposed to believe your story about the three ladies and the hot tub on Elysium?"

Joker cocked an eyebrow at the lieutenant. The man had the kind of deadpan sense of humor that could sometimes wander put of the strangest corners.

"Now, that was _all_ true," Joker said with aplomb. "Except maybe the bit about the dinosaur. I might have made that up. Cue ball has some stones, though, going out on an alien safari in Hong Kong alone."

"Running a kinetic barrier like that, I doubt he's in much danger. He's probably got all sorts of exotic anti-personnel measures squirreled away in that fancy environment suit of his."

"A barrier? How did you..." Joker trailed off as the obvious answer came to him. "Wait, you can feel that?"

Alenko shrugged. "If I'm close enough, yeah. It's not like they run at full strength all the time, so it's only a vague feeling."

Joker nodded. The _Normandy_'s kinetic barrier systems worked much the same way, a reactive system that only went to full strength when struck by an object exceeding a certain speed. Aside from saving power, there was little utility in a field that constantly repelled other objects, especially on a person.

"Can you feel the _Normandy_? Like, the mass field?" Joker asked curiously. The idea of having a sixth sense for the ship's mass effect field was compelling.

"Not in any meaningful way, it's too big. I have a sense of the changes in the a-grav plane, but so does anyone else. It's... I don't know, hard to describe. How aware are you of a gravity well when you're surrounded by it? It's not much different for me."

Joker grunted, vaguely disappointed. "I suppose it would be inconvenient to be exposed to those annoying little forces like, I don't know, crushing inertia."

He was tempted to start quizzing his friend about smaller vehicles like the gravcar, but decided to let it drop. Alenko's voice took on a decidedly guarded tone even in casual discussion of biotics, and no doubt recent events hadn't helped. The pilot often had to remind himself that his friend must share some of his own broad sense of alienation from the normal human world - the lieutenant just didn't wear his differences on the outside.

Instead, Joker peered curiously at the card the volus had given him. It was some kind of transparent plastic, quite flexible, and lined with a luminescent blue display that mimicked a semi-transparent hologram. The little screen showed a menu that looked like a scaled-down version of an Extranet business site.

"Cute little business card," Joker commented. "I wonder how much legal flak they can cram into it?"

"Whatever it is, I wouldn't connect it to anything sensitive, it could have a monitoring bot on it. It's a favorite dirty trick among bankers."

"And you accuse _me_ of paranoia?"

"I think of it as healthy suspicion," the lieutenant replied mildly. "It's an inevitable side-effect of working with computer security."

Joker shrugged and slipped the card into a back pocket. "That was some fancy diplomacy back there. Angling to one-up our fearless leader?"

"Nah, I just did a bit of reading. With all the people we were rubbing shoulders with on the Citadel, it seemed like a good idea to figure out the best ways not to insult the various locals."

"Shooting at them is fine, though..."

"Hey, they shot first." Alenko spread his hands. "Most of the time, anyway."

"Ash always joked about how much fun it would be to tip over a volus and roll him down the hallway."

"That would be pretty funny," Alenko mused, "especially when he finally picks himself up and then promptly sues you down to your underwear."

Mentioning Ashley still brought a knot to Joker's stomach, and he heard the answering flicker of tension from his friend.

Joker chuckled, trying to smooth the feeling away. "Litigious, are they?"

"Ever hear the adage about how a well-armed society is a polite society? Well, they don't carry guns. And in their system, if you can't pay, they can take _you_, lock stock and barrel."

"I thought I read something about that. Isn't that awfully close to slavery?"

Alenko shrugged. "Seems that way to me, but the volus think differently about it. I wonder if that has something to do with the delay in giving them a seat on the Council- the other members must take a dim view to the practice."

They emerged into a vast sunlit courtyard, where rows of holo-displays proclaimed a dizzying array of shops. Among them, Joker spotted restaurants, some of which were still closed. But there were also plenty of people out getting food before their day began.

"This looks promising, what do you want?"

"I don't know how hungry I am," Alenko said. He was scanning the crowds.

"You?" Joker gave an incredulous sniff. "The walking stomach? Must be chilly in Hell today."

"Lets just get this done, we should get back," the lieutenant said. "And on the way you can tell me exactly what the hell happened last night. And no embellishment."

Joker smirked. "Yeah... great."


	5. Heights

Joker was used to being told by a machine how much he got to eat. Faced with an actual choice, he deliberately over-ordered. It helped that he had an able-bodied accomplice to carry everything, a fact he abused without a second thought. The ever-polite lieutenant raised no objections. The trip back was uneventful, Alenko listening to the story of the previous night in grim silence.

As they made their way down the dingy hallway toward the apartment, Alenko's pace began to lag. He stared at the floor, shoulders slumped, wearing an expression suitable for someone being led to the gallows.

"Quit worrying about it!" Joker snapped.

Alenko's head came up, anger and fear warring across his face. "What... what the hell do I say? I mean..."

The pilot rolled his eyes. "Look, what I don't know could fill the oceans. But I do know that she doesn't care, at least not in the way you're so worried about. We're talking about a woman who's had the crap kicked out of her by some of the meanest things the galaxy can dream up. I mean, can you imagine what would have happened if you'd unloaded on_ me_? It would be like sandblasting a soup cracker!"

Alenko paled. "That... that doesn't help at _all_," he said weakly.

"Life is tough!" Joker said, borrowing one of Ashley's favorite quips. A statement that was, like the woman herself, straight to the point.

Heading off any further hesitation, Joker shuffled up to the apartment door and hit the entry pad. The portal grated open, and there was a sudden movement beyond. Shepard stood by the table, a black-clad column of rigid tension, gun in hand. The weapon was only partially raised, but Joker was suddenly glad she was well-practiced in battlefield friend-foe identification, otherwise he was fairly sure he'd be the proud owner of a few superfluous orifices.

Joker hobbled into the room, putting on his most disarming smile. "We got food," he announced as the lieutenant came in and closed the door.

"What the hell were you thinking?" Shepard demanded angrily, returning the gun to the table with a loud clap of metal. Joker felt Alenko flinch behind him.

"_I_ was thinking that no one likes fighting evil on an empty stomach," Joker said, hoping to emphasize whose idea it was. He turned and rescued the bag of food from the lieutenant's weakening grip.

"There are people out there trying to _kill _us!" the commander went on, voice rising. "What possessed you to go wandering around?"

"It's _Kowloon_," Joker said warily. "You could lose King Kong in this district alone, even if he wore a pink tutu and pasties!"

Shepard's eyes flashed. He'd never had to stand up to the commander's direct anger before. She seldom seemed to lose her temper, but he had a feeling that when she got up a head of steam, she could strip the paint off hull plating at ten paces. It seemed to be a trait they looked for in command.

Shepard pinched the bridge of her nose, inhaling. Bracing for a tirade, Joker gingerly approached the table, balancing the heavy bag.

But the tsunami never made the landfall. In a sudden burst, the commander stalked past the pilot, and he glanced back to see Shepard throw her arms around Alenko's neck with enough force to knock him back a step. The lieutenant looked startled, holding his arms half-spread for a moment before tentatively returning the embrace.

Smirking to himself, Joker busied himself with extracting the plastic containers. Delicious smells filled the tiny kitchen, a decided improvement over the musty odor of disuse. When he turned back, he caught Alenko's glance. The lieutenant reluctantly edged away from Shepard, looking sheepish.

"Oh, would you _stop_?" Joker snapped.

Shepard turned back. "Stop-"

"The pretense. I _know._ It's _fine_. Geez." He yanked out a chair and dropped into it with a grateful sigh. "All the dancing around just makes me tired. Now, this is ten times more food than my skinny ass can eat, so I expect help."

There was a murmur of low conversation from the door, which Joker tried assiduously to ignore while he cracked open a bottle of some kind of indeterminate carbonated drink. The grumble of jealousy that was a perpetual background noise in his life flared into a pang, which he tried to quench with a long swallow of welcome liquid.

For all the time he'd spent serving under her, he really didn't know Shepard personally all that well. Part of the problem was that he was stuck on the ship most of the time. Her legend preceded her like a storm front, and what it didn't obscure, she deliberately armored. There had been times Joker was convinced Alenko was being led down the garden path; that Shepard was cruelly allowing him to stew in unrequited feelings.

Joker sucked the strange drink through his teeth, trying to ascertain the flavor. He could count moments like this on one hand, when he'd personally witnessed the circuit complete itself, the connection suddenly illuminate. Through the envy, he was still happy for his friend. And for Shepard, who occupied a place in his head that still overlapped commanding officer, though an altogether different sort than he'd grown to expect. In truth, the pilot harbored a private fondness for the success of unlikely circumstances.

He finally abandoned the identification of his drink, secure in the knowledge that its ingredient list contained more syllables than there were atoms in the table. After a moment, the two marines came to the table and sat down. Her good humor restored, Shepard rooted around among the packaged food items, face intent.

"Oh, good," she said, producing a fork.

"Philistine!" Joker wrinkled his nose as he broke apart his bamboo chopsticks.

"_I_ am a colonial _rube_," Shepard declared, brandishing her utensil like an imperial baton. "Get it right."

Alenko snickered at some private joke. The lieutenant seemed to have rediscovered his bottomless appetite, and the ginger chicken began to disappear at an alarming rate.

"You missed a hell of a ride last night, Alenko," Joker said. "I was pretty smokin', right, Commander?"

"Oh yes," Shepard replied. "I think I was having fun right around the time I was trying to keep my kidneys from escaping through my eye sockets."

"I'm really broken up about not remembering," Alenko said mockingly. "I think I filled my quota of heart attacks for this year when you dropped us on Saren's toenails."

Joker huffed. "What are you talking about? On Ilos I _missed_."

The two marines looked at him with amusingly similar expressions.

"Just think," the pilot said with a wistful smile. "If I'd really nailed it, we could have avoided that whole big party at the Citadel..." He spread his fingers and made a 'splat' sound.

Alenko inspected the bottom of the now empty plastic container with a mournful expression before putting it down and selecting another. "Then I would have gotten to spend another couple of days picking armor bits out of the drive train, _again_."

"Do I detect a hint of criticism of my driving, Lieutenant?" Shepard asked archly.

"No Ma'am," he replied, all innocence.

"Good, because I'd be forced to remind you that the retro-rocket bunny hop was _your_ idea."

"_I_ didn't use it to land on a fire team of geth. I think there's still a few pieces of Destroyer left in there somewhere..."

"I'm sure he's having fun," Joker mused. "Gets to see the universe..."

"Experience re-entry on all sorts of planets..." Alenko said.

The food wasn't anything special, but Joker still considered it a welcome change from ship-board meals. Food in space was a lot like the people; over-manufactured. Spacers who lived off that fare often started to treat anything natural with suspicion, a symptom of spending their lives in an artificial bubble. Joker, for his part, made a point of appreciating the little variations that gave real food character, even if said character took the form of unexpected gristle. Despite their lengthy service histories, the two marines didn't seem to mind either, but Joker suspected that had more to do with biotic appetites. Alenko, especially, seemed to consider edible anything that didn't make an overt effort to get out of reach.

Having done considerable damage to the food supply, the lieutenant's curiosity drew him to the gun still sitting on the table's corner. He picked it up and dropped the ammo slug out, then deployed it a few times, examining the mechanism as it shifted.

"Quit playing with it," Joker quipped. "Didn't your mother tell you you'd grow hair on your palms?"

"It's neat," Alenko said, turning the gun over in his hands. "I haven't seen engineering like this before, it's incredibly compact. But I'm trying to figure out who made it, there's no manufacturer markings. It might be a custom job."

"You are _such_ a nerd sometimes."

"It's what the ladies like," the lieutenant replied, flicking imaginary lint off of his shirt.

Joker snorted. "Bullshit. Is that true, Shepard?"

"If I see a lady, I'll be sure to ask," the commander said absently.

"I thought you more or less qualified."

Shepard turned a cool gaze on the pilot. "I never did learn how to mince properly-"

There came a very soft ping. He couldn't tell where it had come from until Shepard raised her arm and he saw the glowing band of her omni-tool.

"Well, _finally_," she said, standing up. She went to the door and opened it as Alenko also got to his feet.

Two men waited there, dressed in nondescript civilian clothing. The larger of the two strode in as if he owned the place, a large bag slung over his shoulder.

"Shepard!" he said, voice booming in the tiny room. "Why do you always choose such out-of-the-way ratholes? Undercover doesn't have to mean ass-end of the universe!"

"You want a five-star bolt-hole that's actually secure, Tenny,_ you_ pay for it!" Shepard replied. "Joker, Alenko, Rear Admiral Adam Tennyson and Corporal Jin Fa-Sung." There was a particular, almost sarcastic tilt to her voice as she pronounced the names.

Alenko snapped a salute as Joker pushed himself up and did the same, though with notably less enthusiasm.

Tennyson was a bear of man, with a barrel chest and thick arms covered in a carpet of dark brown hair. His lined face showed evidence of the kind of beard that would make a daily end run on his eyebrows without the persistent application of a razor. As if to placate the beast, the admiral allowed some of it to grow out into a goatee and moustache that formed a formidable protective thatch around his mouth, which was currently spread into a broad grin.

The younger man who came in behind the admiral was unassuming by comparison, with plain Asian features and short, sharply spiked black hair. A shock of recognition shot through Joker. Jin, dressed as waitstaff at the party, had handed him the glass of wine; right after tripping the insolent fighter pilot.

"You get around, don't you?" the pilot said with smirk.

Jin saluted and flashed the pilot a winsome smile, laden with mischief.

"He's my man on the inside," Tennyson explained, clapping the corporal on the back. "Blends in with the locals."

"The fact that I'm Korean notwithstanding," Jin said offhandedly. "Ass..." His voice had the faint ghost of an accent.

Joker exchanged a look with Alenko. The lieutenant's expression mirrored his own shock at being in the presence of so senior an officer, yet the feeling in the room was anything but what he would have expected for this kind of situation."

"Well, everybody in one piece, then?" Tennyson asked, sweeping his gaze around the room.

"Not for lack of trying on their part," Shepard said, crossing her arms. "And one ill-advised hunting expedition."

Jin sidled up to the table and appraised what was left of their meal with a hungry gaze.

"Did you stay off comms at least?" Tennyson asked.

"Yes." Shepard said, looking at Joker.

Tennyson tapped his fingers on the table. "Access any of your accounts?"

"I have a credit chip," Joker said, squirming a little under the large man's stare. "Got it when we landed. Better exchange rates."

"And personally untraceable." Tennyson said. "Good. Well, they certainly weren't expecting you to bolt last night, Shepard. You caused quite a little stir. They were tripping all over themselves trying to catch up to you without tipping off the whole party... completely ruined their careful set-up."

"My heart bleeds for them."

"Actually," Tennyson said, his voice dropping to a predatory note, "it was very educational. Some unexpected people were suddenly looking nervous. I have some new names to check out when I get back to Arcturus."

"Captain Silah?" Alenko asked.

"Hmm? No, I don't think so. Silah's views on biotics are quite clear; the man's as subtle as a solar flare. Not Cerberus' style."

"But it wouldn't surprise me if he was invited for the express purpose of getting under your skin," Jin suggested. "Man, I'm starving. Been up all night chasing blips." He scooped up a nearly-full container of white rice and began wolfing it down, pausing only to dump in some leftover sauce.

"It _was_ kind of a strange crowd, wasn't it?" Joker said.

Tennyson nodded. "I think they wanted to make sure everyone would be a little on edge."

"How was the drug delivered, anyway?" Alenko asked suddenly. "I thought I was paying attention, but I didn't notice _anything_."

"Do you remember someone bumping into you?" Jin asked.

The lieutenant frowned. "Uh, nothing that seemed untoward."

"Doesn't take much." Jin paused in his systematic decimation of the rice to pop open the interface on his omni-tool and tap in a few commands with the end of a chopstick. "You've got a few of these in you, probably your back or arm." The amber interface projected a hologram of a small sphere, punctured with several holes, making it look hollow.

"Oh, how delightful," Joker said, squinting at the sphere, "new friends!" It looked rather like the micro-photography he'd seen of bacteria.

"They're not dangerous anymore, they've delivered their payload. They're nano-fabricated casings that Cerberus loads up with the drug, then introduces with a micro-dermal injector disguised as something innocent. The casings will dissolve within a few hours."

"Has the drug mix ever been shown to cause memory loss?" Shepard asked. "Blackouts, that kind of thing?"

Alenko glanced at Shepard, brows furrowed.

"No," Tennyson said, "but we're dealing with a limited sample size. And we didn't exactly get to interview anyone from the fatal cases."

"Symptoms?" Jin said around an inelegant mouthful of food. "Any loss of consciousness? Seizing?"

"No, nothing like that," the commander said. "Just... a kind of memory regression."

The corporal chewed thoughtfully. "Hhn, sounds like TGA," he said after swallowing.

Shepard raised an eyebrow. "Don't make me ask, Jin."

"Transient global amnesia," he replied. "Whole years of memory can get temporarily shut down. It's not well understood... but it's thought it can be triggered by venous congestion of the brain. Exertion, stress, even migraines have been blamed for it. Damn rare, though."

"Does it do any permanent damage?" she asked in a carefully level tone.

"Not that I've ever heard." Jin shook his head. "Hence the 'transient' part. It's one of those totally random hiccups that can happen to our neurological system. It's more scary for everyone else, really."

"This is all very educational," Joker put in, diverting attention from the look that passed between Shepard and the lieutenant, "but did you actually catch anyone?" He sat down and slouched indolently in his seat.

Tennyson looked down at the pilot. "We had tracers in place well before things went down, and spent all night chasing down the leads. I had to threaten to break a few arms, but we have a location."

"I would have thought Cerberus operatives would have had more spine," Alenko said.

Tennyson clucked his tongue. "Cerberus isn't a monolithic entity, Lieutenant. The people you dealt with during your operation on Nepheron were trained soldiers, but that represents only one cell of many. We're dealing with some kind of anti movement here, but they've probably never even heard the name Cerberus. The _source_ of their funding and orders are the issue."

"Which only makes our job harder," Jin said. "Cerberus has their fingers in everyone's pie, but it's doubly difficult to trace the finger back to the-"

Jin's omni-tool suddenly sprang to life. "Shit," he said, glancing at the display.

The mood in the room changed in an instant. It all seemed familiar somehow; in his mind's eye Joker could feel the ship flex under the combined shifting of muscles as the crew leaned into their consoles, faces suddenly alert. _Sensor hit, pattern unknown._

"What is it?" Alenko asked.

"I think we need to vacate. I left a few trip-lights out there," the corporal said. "In case of uninvited guests. One of them just went off."

"Let's move," Tennyson said crisply.

Shepard scooped up the pistol and its slug, and handed them to Alenko. "This way."

_All crew to battlestations. _Joker sighed and pulled himself to his feet, a nervous tension coiling in his stomach. "Bunch of inconsiderate jerks," he muttered, "I just finished breakfast."

Instead of walking to the outer door, Shepard led the way into the living room. Stepping across to the far wall, she dug her fingers under a small panel set into the wall and pulled it back to reveal a handle that looked like the emergency release on a gravliner pressure door.

That comparison turned out to be not far from the truth. With a vociferous complaint from the hinges, a narrow door swung open, its seams emerging suddenly from the unremarkable metal paneling of the wall. Brilliant sunlight angled into the room, illuminating countless motes of swirling dust.

Joker gingerly shuffled closer and looked out. The portal opened into a vast chasm, bordered by the hive-like residential buildings. An exterior platform led away to the right along the wall, fenced in with an inadequate-looking railing. Gusts of warm wind blew up from below, where the arcology's landscape seemed to drop away into nothingness.

Joker swallowed uncomfortably. He supposed it was a fire exit, probably leading to an auxiliary stairwell, but he wondered if there weren't people who would rather brave the flames than that dizzying cliff.

"Hope you aren't afraid of heights," Jin said from beside him. The other man was grinning, but there was a forced edge to his words.

"Oh, I love heights!" Joker quipped. "It's just the sudden stop at the bottom I'm allergic to. Hives, you know?"


	6. Access

Joker found a strange comfort in the fact the people flanking him on that narrow ledge could control gravity. At the very least, the continued repetition of that thought helped keep his meal from escaping a churning stomach while they skirted the outer skin of the arcology tower, passing the outline of doors just like the one Shepard had closed behind them. He didn't look anywhere but where he needed to place his crutches so they wouldn't snag on the toothed metal floor. The small group passed a trapdoor connected to a ladder with rungs inset into the walls, but thankfully Shepard didn't stop. Faced with such a climb, Joker rather suspected he would opt for the short way down, if only to experience flight one final time before the inevitable end.

The sloping side of the tower finally ran up to a massive buttress that stretched the full height of the tower. After some grunting and pushing, another door appeared in the smooth metal skin, admitting them into the mostly hollow structure. Joker blinked in the sudden dimness, glad to be out of the sun and wind beating against the smooth side of the tower. A complicated structure of interlocking carbon-fiber struts criss-crossed the gently sloped tube, which appeared to be ringed along the inside by a spiraling staircase.

Alenko approached the railing and looked down. "That's... a lot of floors."

Joker smirked. After the morning's excursion, his legs were already aching. "Would someone like to volunteer to carry me? I don't weigh much, I promise."

"Maybe _you _don't, but all that hardware is another matter." Shepard walked to one of the inner struts and opened a small panel clamped to it. Inside was a single button, which she pressed.

After a moment, a rumble echoed up from the cavernous stairwell. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, Joker noticed the interior struts bore a set of runners.

"Saints be praised," he murmured.

Jin chuckled. "Which ones?"

"The more the merrier," the pilot drawled, "I'm not picky."

"I suppose we could use all the friends we can get right now."

"We're doing that well, huh?"

"Depends, how much have you offended Cerberus lately?"

Joker glanced at Shepard and Alenko. "We're boned."

The commander flashed him a humorless smile. "They won't be following us through the fire escape, I made sure of that. There's limited interior access to this passage, and in case of power loss, this elevator is on a different grid than the tower."

Tennyson glanced at Shepard with an expression of approval. "We should be able to stay ahead of them. But Lieutenant Moreau, I'm afraid you're stuck with us for now. I can't risk them making a grab for you."

"Your concern warms my heart, Admiral."

"Don't get too cozy, I might just decide to use you for bait."

Joker put on a narrow-eyed grin, trying to determine the real intent of the admiral's statement. "I don't recommend it. I'm a little on the stringy side."

A plain metal box whirred up through the gaping shaft and stopped in front of them with a sharp hiss. The elevator was just large enough to admit the five of them, but made for uncomfortably close quarters. Air whistled through the grating that enclosed them as the contraption traveled down the buttress shaft.

"Sooo... why aren't we calling in the cavalry?" Joker asked, trying to find a position that didn't involve leaning on anyone.

Jin shrugged. "We _are_ the cavalry."

"The Chinese government takes issue with noisy Alliance operations on their soil without justification," the admiral explained.

"Why would they be worried?" the pilot said. "They're full signatories to the Alliance Charter."

"They're also a sovereign nation, and as such prefer to deal with things internally," Tennyson said. "But we can't afford to wait around for the bureaucracy. I have to assume our three-headed doggy friend has people on the inside, and they could delay us just long enough for their operatives to slither away."

"Let me guess, we're out looking for justification," Alenko said, his tone blunt.

"Just looking," Tennyson replied.

Shepard snorted lightly.

"_With_ a mandate to act should I deem it necessary," the admiral finished, shooting her a look. "We have an opportunity here, one I fully intend to capitalize on. There are very few people I can trust. We have to put a stop to these attacks before they get out of hand, so if I can cut the head off the snake today, I _will_."

He wormed the bag off of his shoulder and reached in, pulling out a smaller blue handbag of suspicious length which he handed to Shepard. "Here, I brought you a present."

"You're a few months late." She unzipped the top a few inches, revealing the grip of a folded shotgun. A smile quirked the side of her mouth. "My favorite color too. I might be willing to overlook it, this time."

Despite a turn through something like Basic, Joker wasn't particularly comfortable with firearms. There was something still too close, too personal about the violence they represented. They were also technically illegal in the city. He was overly aware that the folded jacket Alenko carried concealed the pistol taken the previous night.

He'd had to train with firearms, with a pistol at least. He'd fired the large guns a couple of times, just enough to know that doing so rattled his teeth. A lifelong reliance on his arms to help him get around had granted him good upper body strength, but he didn't quite trust his legs to stick with the plan of absorbing a long gun's considerable recoil. Still, the range instructor had always seemed disappointed that he could never manage to put Joker's excellent reflexes to 'better' use.

The elevator finally ground to a halt and the doors opened into a dim concrete tunnel lit with emergency strips. At this level, the supporting buttress was massive, and they followed the lit exit signs to a hinged door closed from the inside with magnetic strips, finally emerging through it into the sunlight.

"We'll stay in the crowd," Tennyson said, leading the way to a large promenade that skirted the base of the tower. "They probably won't come at us in public. Stay off comms and turn off any GPS feedback."

Not comforted by the admiral's statement, Joker found himself frequently looking over his shoulder, convinced that any minute someone would recognize them, or worse. As they fell in with the citizenry, sometimes he caught a wayward second glance, a murmur of conversation. But not much else. The Citadel, he realized, must seem very distant to the people living here, the business of aliens and sentient machines even more so. There would be no reason in their minds why Commander Shepard would be here, on foot in the heart of Kowloon- no reason to go looking.

But it only took one person...

"Okay, so what the hell is a rear admiral doing running around on the ground?" Joker asked Shepard, trying to keep his voice low.

"You can try to stuff an N behind a desk, but that doesn't mean he's going to stay there," the commander replied.

"Politics!" Tennyson snapped, making the pilot jump. "The brass doesn't like the fact that I go poking into everyone's dark corners looking for skeletons."

Joker squared his shoulders, trying to recover from the shock of being unexpectedly overheard. "Sir, from where we're standing, you _are_ the brass."

"I know." Tennyson pulled a long-suffering expression. "It's a revolting state of affairs. They tried to neutralize me with this flaming promotion, but so help me, I'll make it bite them in the ass..."

"It warms my heart to no end to hear the dick-waving continues unabated at the highest echelons of power."

Jin chuckled. "Actually, it's gotten worse since the Battle of the Citadel."

"Yeah, thanks for that, Shepard," Tennyson said.

The commander shot him a sweet smile. "You're very welcome, Tenny. I thought you needed the exercise, your weakness for milkshakes is starting to show."

The admiral glanced back a few times as they walked, his impatience at the slow pace evident. If for no other reason than to ignore both Tennyson's irritated looks and the crawling feeling of being watched, Joker struck up a conversation with the corporal. Once he got going, the lanky man had a temperament similar to that of the volus they'd met that morning, with a mouth that seemed in a constant hurry to catch up to a busy brain.

They boarded a public transit shuttle which headed out over the bay toward the island. Joker wondered why they hadn't opted for a private taxi, but he had a sneaking suspicion it had something to do with testing their pursuers willingness to make a public mess. Given their recent experiences, he wasn't convinced civilian casualties were high on Cerberus' list of concerns.

It had been some years since Joker had visited Hong Kong, but he was struck once again by the contrast between the island metropolis and the mainland where they had spent the night. In Kowloon, a huge population of working-class people was packed into the utilitarian, hive-like towers. And they were happy for it- conditions in the poorer parts of the country were getting worse instead of better, one of the endemic problems faced by all Earth nations. Among Kowloon residents lived the hope that one day, he or she would be able to move to Hong Kong itself.

Billions of credits had been spent on the soaring city arcology, each tower trying to out-do the last in design and modern amenities. It was said that a resident could live out their entire lives without touching solid earth or being wet by a drop of rain. This wasn't the restrained, old money wealth of the Citadel Presidium, it was exuberant showmanship. Even the poorest resident lived a lifestyle most Earthborn humans would consider lavish.

The energy on the promenades was different than Kowloon, but no less lively. There were lots of tourists, and people engaged in business via their personal comms even as they walked and shopped. There was a certain inward focus to the people here- many were engaged in conversation with people far away, and completely ignored their fellow pedestrians.

"Now, how did _he_ get ahead of us?" Joker said to no one in particular.

The admiral dropped back to the pilot's side. "What?"

"I swear I saw that guy back in Kowloon. I dunno, you people are making me paranoid. It's probably nothing."

"Like hell it is," Tennyson growled. "Keep moving. Describe, but don't turn around."

"Uh... Asian, blue shirt..." Joker screwed his face up in consternation; the temptation to look was appalling. Instead, he focused on putting one foot in front of the other while trying to conjure the fleeting memory. "He was walking with his hands in his pockets, alone..."

"Blue shirt with dark trim, circular pattern?" Jin asked quietly.

"Yeah."

"Got him."

The admiral gave a faint nod. "Stay on him."

He led the way across an intersection, then down a side street which tunneled underneath one of the massive arcology towers. The tunnel was lined on both sides with shops and restaurants. Vents in the ceiling admitted natural sunlight, fed through the massive tower by ducts and a system of computer-controlled mirrors.

"Still tailing," Jin reported.

A creeping itch started between Joker's shoulder blades where he imagined the tracking cross-hairs of a sniper rifle. He was starting to wonder if the corporal had an extra pair of eyes on his ass- he never turned around, nor broke his casual rolling gait. The passage ahead opened into a plaza dominated by a multi-tiered fountain. The smell of chlorinated water permeated the space, and the hiss and gurgle echoed around the domed ceiling, washing the sound of the crowd in a wall of white noise. Tennyson turned a corner into the fountain rotunda, passing a short line-up of people buying ice cream. Multiple corridors branched off in all directions.

"Shepard, why don't you take Jin and go introduce yourselves?" the admiral said, pitching his voice low. "Nicely, of course. The signal we followed last night led to this tower, so maybe our new friend can give us a better lead."

The commander raised an eyebrow. "You expect _me_ to be subtle on a crowded street when all I have is a gun that kicks like an angry mule?"

"Be creative. If you're going to complain about it, I can send you back to the orphanage."

Alenko's head snapped around, his eyes wide before narrowing down to a dagger glare.

"That desk job is slowing you down, old man," the commander said smoothly, hefting her bag over her shoulder. "C'mon, Jin, before senility kicks in and he forgets why we're here."

"Aye aye," Jin replied with a jaunty smile. "That passage there should loop around..."

Shepard strode away with a brisk step, the corporal on her heels.

"A fine woman," Tennyson commented, stroking his beard. "Shame she's so stubborn."

Alenko glowered at the rear admiral, the muscles in his jaw standing out. "I'd take it as a personal favor if you didn't talk about my commanding officer as if she was a head of beef," he said in a clipped voice.

Tennyson rounded on Alenko in one smooth movement, bringing him up short. "Shepard," the admiral declared extravagantly, "is my student, dear friend, and sister-in-arms of many a battle... and I'll call her a cow if I damn well please. Now sit tight."

The admiral turned and headed back the way they'd come, angling out into the center of the promenade and making himself a rather obvious target.

"Way to take the bait," Joker drawled once Tennyson was out of earshot.

"Drop dead," Alenko said between his teeth.

"Ah, come on, haven't you been paying attention? If he said it to her face, she'd either laugh, or knock his nuts up into his soft palate, _then_ laugh."

The lieutenant grunted noncommittally, lapsing into sullen silence. An earnest pain was setting into Joker's legs, but the absolute last thing he was going to do in front of a bunch of marines was whine about it. He settled himself against a wall and tried to relieve some of the weight, wondering sourly what kind of blisters he had to look forward to in the morning.

A few minutes later, Tennyson re-appeared, indicating they should follow with a toss of his head. Joker trailed along behind Alenko as they caught up to the admiral and headed back the way they had come to a side tunnel. They passed a large set of doors that seemed to lead higher up into the structure, finally arriving at another door, this one set into the wall as to be inconspicuous. Writing in both Chinese and English warned 'No Admittance'.

Without the slightest hint that he might be doing something he wasn't supposed to, Tennyson marched up to the door and smacked the entrance panel. It emitted a garbled squawk and the thick doors rolled open. Beyond was a T intersection to a featureless tiled hallway. Alenko and Joker scooted through as the door closed behind them and the sounds of the promenade full of people vanished into stillness.

A low whistle attracted their attention to the left, where the man Joker had spotted following them lay face-down on the floor. Jin was crouched next to him, his omni-tool interface open. Shepard stood by, arms folded, wearing the cool expression of a cat that'd gotten away with something.

"Did you have to put him out?" Tennyson asked critically.

Shepard tossed a pistol to him. "He sort of insisted. He actually bolted when he saw us coming."

"Amateur," the admiral sniffed. "If he'd stayed in public, he would have made himself a much harder target."

"He also got a little upset when Shepard showed her biotics," Jin said. "I think he might be a Fist."

"A what?" Joker asked.

Tennyson rolled his eyes. "There's a gang running around Hong Kong calling themselves 'Glorious Fist of Purity' or some nonsense. A bunch of thugs who chose biotics as their hate-by-numbers cause celebre. Some of the local Tongs use them as muscle, and to keep their own biotics in line. It's highly likely that they were involved in the drug attempt."

Alenko frowned. "The Tongs have biotics on payroll?"

"Two that we know for sure, possibly a third. They seem to disrupt the gangs' normal power structure, though. There's a bit of a cold war going on between the two most powerful families, and biotics have become the super-weapons." The admiral waved a dismissive hand. "But they're the Hong Kong government's problem. What_ I'm_ worried about is who hired these goons to come after us."

"Well, this one wasn't supposed to be in here," Jin said without looking up from his omni-tool interface. "Did you notice the lock?"

"I did indeed. I'm guessing it was like that before we showed up."

Jin nodded.

Alenko peered down at the recumbent form. The man's sleeves were pulled back, revealing omni-tool emitters wrapped around both forearms. "That's an awfully big rig for a civilian. Looks like... Ariake?"

"Nothing exciting," Jin replied. "Logic Arrest, last year's advance model. He's done a bit of work, though. I think he fancies himself a hacker.

"Did they ever fix the NG77-protocol exploit?"

"Eventually. Firmware release, I think, Ariake was kind of quiet about it. But our friend here has been negligent. Most inauspicious... for him." Jin whistled softly to himself as he tapped in commands. The amber display on his tool flashed with scrolling text and Joker caught flashes of paragraphs in Chinese characters.

"I don't care how good your scripts are, you're a lousy hacker of you don't stay up to date with product releases..." Alenko seemed genuinely insulted by the notion.

"What, read the instructions? Gods forbid," the corporal mused.

Tennyson shifted in obvious impatience. "Well?"

"Lots on encrypted files. But... Leuchtturm keeps coming up in a name scan."

The admiral's brow lowered into an angry grimace. He swore sulphurously under his breath. "Their main office is in this tower. How much do we want to wager we can get there from these tunnels?"

"A bet you'd win, I think," Jin said, snapping off his tool.

Tennyson looked down one corridor and then the other, then waved toward the unconscious man. "Shepard, get him out of the way. I'm going to backtrack a bit and see where this hallway goes. Lieutenant Alenko, come with me."

Shepard and Jin pulled the man up under his shoulders and started hauling him down the hallway, Joker trailing along behind. Sounds echoed eerily around the plain, off-white walls, and floor was marked with even trails of wear.

"What got _his _shorts in a wad all of a sudden?" Joker asked.

"Leuchtturm is the name of a company that's come up a few times in our investigations," Jin replied gravely, "but not a lead he wanted to see pan out."

"Why?"

"Tennyson takes treason very seriously, but that doesn't help when you find out a friend might be involved," the corporal said over his shoulder. "These roots go deep, Lieutenant Moreau. It's factions within our own leadership, and within the governments of all member nations. At first, we thought it was an outgrowth of the xenophobia that came out of the First Contact War. But the more we dig, the more it looks like there's a real driving purpose behind it all.

"Commander Shepard made a lot of people very angry when she gave that order to aid the _Destiny Ascension_. No one wants to say it outright, but it's clear there's a belief in some circles that her decision not only ruined a perfect opportunity to earn a place in the Citadel's politics, but to dominate them."

"Idiots!" Shepard growled. "If they knew-" She shut her mouth with a snap, her eyes glittering with anger.

Jin nodded faintly. "Very human idiots, concerned primarily with their own power. The oaths we took on that stage before the Admiralty all sounded wonderful at the time, but do we really know who we pledged our lives to?"

Joker frowned, unsure of what to say to that. The two marines heaved the man into an alcove and Jin quickly removed the Ariake omni-tool and bound the man's hands behind him with a length of plastic tie, looping it around a metal pipe running down from the ceiling.

Jin swiped his hands over his pants as he stood up. "That should keep him out of our hair."

"Now as long as Alenko and Tennyson don't kill each other, we should be fine," Joker quipped.

Shepard looked at him. "What's this?"

"I don't think our dear lieutenant likes him very much. They had words."

"What a surprise," she sighed. "Nothing precipitous, I hope."

"There was some growling and pawing the ground, but no fur flying just yet."

"Is this where I roll my eyes and make some comment about men?"

Joker grinned. "It's considered traditional."

Shepard shook her head with an indulgent expression. "Tenny's a great fighter... and lot of fun when he's not thinking with his dick."

"That accounts for what, five percent of his existence?"

"Oh, it's not that bad."

"I own one, Shepard, I know the truth."

"It's okay, we like you anyway."

"Is that 'like', or 'tolerate'?" Jin said mildly.

Shepard just smirked. "The big secret is, we're no better."

"_Heresy_," the corporal gasped with insincere shock.

"He _is_ kind of an asshole, though," the pilot said.

She nodded. "Well, yes."

Joker put a hand over his heart. "I'm hurt, Commander. You had me so convinced I got to be your first."

Shepard gave a dark chuckle. "Sorry to burst your bubble, Joker, but when you're a woman in the military, assholes sprout like weeds."

"How come Tennyson gets a pass?"

"It's complicated."

The pilot waggled his eyebrows. "I bet."

"Not _that_ kind of complicated, smartass." Shepard stopped, cocking her head. "What's that?"

Ahead of them, a huge, square machine rounded the corner on heavy wheels. It was a dirty-looking steel-gray box covered with bright orange alert striping. Two large grabber arms were folded across its front, and an array of small sensor eyes ran along the bottom of the thick bumpers. Joker suddenly understood the perfectly even pattern of wear on the floor.

Jin moved toward the wall, pulling Joker along with him. "Service robot. It shouldn't bother us."

Shepard flattened herself along the wall as well, her bagged shotgun held across her chest as she stared suspiciously at the oncoming machine. After a pause to assess its route, the robot trundled past them with a singular, mindless intent. Most of its bulk appeared to be a hopper in which were stacked large blocks of compacted material.

"Huh, we must be close to the recyc plant," Jin said.

Shepard unzipped her bag and gripped the shotgun. "Let's check it out."

It turned out to be in a large room just around the corner. Joker had never seen a recyc plant in person before. Marvels of post-Mars technology, they were macro-scale versions of the military omni-tool fabricator units that soldiers and colonists carried. Waste from the entire tower was conveyed down into a sorter, which separated organic from inorganic before feeding the main part of the machine, which broke down component materials and pressed them into blocks, ready to cart away. Instead of waging a head-on battle with the culture of disposability that had been endemic to previous centuries, these machines ground up the inevitable detritus to be used again.

Marvel of technology or not, what the recyc plant wasn't was a marvel of aesthetics. This particular beast had evidently been in service for some years, and showed all the signs of being treated with as much care and ceremony as one would expect for a glorified trash compactor. The grimy machine chuffed and rumbled as a constant stream of material fed into it, filling the room with a dry heat and the cloying smell of molten composite plastic. Most of the mechanical bulk of it was concerned with moving the material around; the actual breakdown was performed by a fleet of nano-machines at its sealed heart.

Standing in the doorway, Shepard suddenly snapped her foot down on the floor. There was a muffled crunch. Wearing an expression of disgust, she lifted her shoe off the messy remains of what had probably been a sizable cockroach.

"What did it ever do to you?" Jin asked mildly.

The commander skirted away from it, eyeing the floor with a narrow glare. "It was born, or hatched, or whatever the hell they do."

"Well, where there's one roach, there's probably a thousand more..."

Shepard set her teeth. "Kindly shut up, Corporal."

It all happened in the blink of an eye. In space, even the biggest gun made no noise. But here in the cavernous chamber, the sound of a hundred mass-accelerated particles breaking the speed of sound was a roar.


	7. Debris

Jin's body jerked spasmodically. His eyes bulged as a forest of red slashes bloomed over his torso and he staggered sideways into the stack of metal ingots to Joker's right. The pilot lurched back in shock, an inarticulate yelp bursting out of his lungs. He caught the flash of the whites of eyes, not fifteen feet away at the corner of the recyc machine, and the bore of a gun.

Shepard had meant what she'd said the previous night about Alenko's uncontrolled biotic manifestation not having been that bad. The commander stepped forward and threw out her hand, and a storm of blue distortion rippled through the air. This wasn't one of those inoffensive vid demonstrations, making cups float off the table and the like- the man flew back into the wall with such violence that it looked as if he'd taken a wrecking ball to the chest.

Something caught in the corner of Joker's eye, and he turned his head just in time to see another thug lunge from the cover of a piling to their left and land heavily on Shepard's back. The man wrapped an arm around her throat and knocked the shotgun out of her hand, seeming to fumble at the back of her head. The pilot heard a click, and a shock of dark energy flashed across the commander's body. His face twisted in an expression of fanatical hate as her attacker let out a triumphant shout.

But he wasted his fleeting second of advantage. It seemed he'd been misinformed about the effects of amp removal- Shepard didn't crumple into a defeated heap as he obviously expected. Instead she drove her elbow sharply into his ribs, then grabbed the arm around her throat and pulled free, twisting it as she went. The man's eyes flew wide as his shoulder rotated too far, and the commander slammed the heel of her hand into his overextended elbow. The wet crunch of the breaking joint was sickeningly familiar to the pilot. Without losing momentum, she rammed the thug face-first into the metal ductwork of the recyc plant, and his screech of pain cut off with a loud bang. He crumpled and lay still.

"Sh- Shepard!" Jin gasped as he sank to the ground. "More... more coming!"

The commander scooped up her shotgun. "Get to cover!" she snapped, pushing Joker toward a stack of metal ingots.

She turned and fired several times in the general direction the corporal had indicated, and there were answering shouts. Joker caught glimpses of figures moving around the machinery, and a second later, automatic gunfire came tearing through the air, chattering off the walls and ingots. He crammed himself into the corner, willing his body as small as possible.

Shepard was close by, behind another stack. She reached behind her head, and Joker watched as she grabbed the dangling end of a cable coming from the neck of her top and quickly snapped it back into place at the base of her skull. The chamber echoed with the roar of gunfire. The commander performed what looked like a quick, elaborate hand-sign, and suddenly a wash of blueish distortion bubbled around her body. Without hesitation, she turned and charged around the corner into the teeth of the storm.

To Joker, it looked like utter lunacy.

Alenko burst into the room, his own biotic shield shimmering around him. He skidded to a halt, planted his feet, and pulled his right hand up hard. Joker heard several shouts of alarm. The lieutenant quickly looked around, and spotted the pilot.

"Joker! What-" Alenko broke off as his eyes widened. "Oh, no..."

Tennyson strode into the room on Alenko's heels, sighting down a huge assault rifle. Joker peeked around his cover to watch as the admiral, firing in precise, controlled bursts, cut down the gang members even as they scrambled for cover. One man died as he ran- his legs abruptly stopped working, and his forward momentum carried him into a stack of paper fiber bricks, which collapsed in a heap.

"Admiral! Medkit, stat!" Alenko called, running toward Jin.

Tennyson slung the bag he was carrying off his shoulder and tossed it to the lieutenant, then hand-signed to Shepard. She nodded and disappeared behind the recyc machine, her shotgun in the lead. Tennyson shadowed her from the other side.

Joker leaned against the stack of ingots, paralyzed by the spectacle. Jin's whole torso was a gory mess, blood spreading in a pool under him. His breathing came in sharp, pained gasps and his face was ashen. Alenko jammed his pistol in his belt and knelt next to the corporal. The lieutenant's hands worked quickly as he sliced the shredded remains of the shirt away. He pulled out a micro-dermal injector, shooting it into Jin's neck before setting it aside and picking up a medi-gel applicator. Bursts of gunfire brayed from the far side of the room.

Even as his own heart tried to climb out his throat, Joker marvelled at Alenko's calm. He spoke to Jin in a measured voice as he spread the gel over the corporal's wounds, seemingly unfazed by the glistening length of intestine that he eased back in place before pulling the shredded flesh together and sealing it.

Shepard and Tennyson re-appeared at the far end of the room. They stopped and seemed to be discussing something, and Shepard's face grew angry as it sharpened into an argument.

"That's an _order_, Commander," Tennyson boomed, his voice rising to carry over the rumbling machinery.

Something crossed Alenko's stolid expression, his eyes jumping briefly in the commander's direction. He picked up the injector again, feeding another capsule into it before shooting the contents into the corporal's arm. Jin's breathing had evened, but was still shallow. Joker could hardly believe the man was still conscious, but his glassy eyes continued to track the people around him.

Tennyson came striding over to Jin. He dropped to one knee, taking in the hideous wounds with a glance. He exchanged a look with Alenko, who mouthed something Joker couldn't make out.

"That miserable bastard," Tennyson growled.

"Politics..." Jin croaked with a wry face.

"This stopped being politics the minute it became murder!" the admiral snapped. "Lieutenant, give me a hand. Let's get him out of the open."

Together, the two marines gingerly levered Jin off the ground and carried him to the far side of the room, to a corner back behind the machine. Joker trailed along behind, noting the open doorway of a cargo elevator on the far wall. Shepard brought up the rear, her expression stony. Tennyson and Alenko settled Jin on the ground, in the warm air venting from the top of the machine. Shepard came and knelt beside him as well.

"I'm afraid you're going to have to sit this one out, Corporal," Tennyson said. "But I'm going to put a stop to this once and for all." He pulled off his jacket and balled it up, then slid it under the corporal's head.

Jin smiled weakly. "Give 'em one for me, sir."

"Several," Tennyson said darkly. Then he took Jin's hand and clasped it firmly. "Keep breathing, Sung."

"... that an order?"

"You're damn right it is, son."

"About the sitting things out..." Joker blurted.

"Yes," Tennyson said, standing up. "Lieutenant, give him your pistol. You can take one of the Fist's guns."

Alenko looked at his bloody hands, then wiped them on his pants, his expression pained. He plucked the pistol out of his waistband and handed it to Joker between thumb and forefinger.

"Thanks awfully," the pilot quipped, taking the gun. His stomach crawled with a dread.

Shepard laid a hand on Jin's shoulder, speaking softly. Then she stood. "Stay out of sight," she said to Joker. "Hopefully this won't take long." She cast a steely look at the admiral.

"We'll take that cargo elevator up," Tennyson said, fussing with his assault rifle. "It probably leads right to Leuchtturm's doorstep. Moreau, we'll call you if we're in the clear, otherwise radio silence."

"Sir." Joker could find no other remark to make.

Tennyson threw an encouraging salute to Jin, then turned and walked away toward the cargo elevator, Shepard following. Alenko lingered for a moment, casting a quick look to Jin and then Joker.

"Good luck," Joker said quietly.

Alenko gave a small nod, a regretful look crossing his face before he turned and hurried after Shepard and Tennyson.

Joker watched them go. He leaned against the wall and gingerly sat down, wincing as the braces rubbed the raw spots on his legs.

"Sorry you gotta stay and guard the boat," Jin murmured.

"As if I'm not used to it," Joker grumbled as he turned the gun over in his hands. "I'm not much use in a fight anyway."

Jin indicated the muzzle. "Point that end at the thing you want to go away."

Joker controlled an urge to yell at the wounded man. "Are you ever serious?" he asked testily.

"Not if I can help it. Are you?"

"Har har. I thought it was just Shepard that was a bit nuts, but all you N7s are crazy."

"N-five."

"Whatever." Joker waved a hand. "Close enough."

Jin gave a small shrug. "Put a bunch of over-achievers with a penchant for violence into barracks the size of a microchip, then work their asses to the bone... Are you surprised that Ns are a little strange?"

Joker scratched his chin. "Cope or die, huh?"

"That about sums it up." A small smile played across the corporal's face. "I think you would have fit right in."

Joker snorted inelegantly.

"You weren't dragged along on this for your health, y'know," Jin said in a soft voice. "Shepard said she brought you because you have a knack for noticing details that a lot of people miss."

"She could have... I don't know, warned me."

"Of what? We weren't even sure they would make their move last night, and it sure as hell... wasn't supposed to go like this. We just sort of make it up as we go along... and do our best."

The pilot glanced at the corporal's blood-soaked torso. "Fat lot of good that's doing us."

Jin gave a slight shrug. "Cerberus... doesn't play fair. But Shepard seems to think you can handle it. The list of people who know... who we can trust is very, very short."

Joker opened his mouth to retort, then closed it.

"I hope you lot on the _Normandy_ are taking care of Shepard... she damn well doesn't do it herself." Jin went on after a moment. He breathing was still painfullt shallow.

"I noticed, probably after I scooped her out of the exploding volcano. To hear Alenko talk about it, she does seem to have a few screws loose when it comes to personal safety..."

"I dunno... I don't think she's got a death wish, I think she just always defaults to putting herself... at the bottom of the priority list in any given situation."

"That's kind of stupid."

"I'm sure... all of _your_ hang-ups make perfect, logical sense."

"Of course they do." Joker examined his fingernails. "I don't bother them, and they mess up my life on a regular basis."

Jin chuckled weakly, then a grimace of pain flickered across his face. He drew a shuddering breath. "Wish I could have been... at the Citadel," he said finally.

"No, you don't. It was a clusterfuck of apocalyptic proportions."

"Please... it was a 'high-attrition engagement'."

Joker rolled his eyes. "That's almost as good as 'retrograde maneuver'."

"At least it was... a clean fight, against a clear enemy. Don't get... much of that here. Must have been something..."

Joker frowned. There was something in Jin's voice that told him the corporal was more interested in having a story to listen to than anything else. The pilot didn't consider himself much of a poet. How could he possibly do the truth justice? Would he ever fly like that again? He didn't know. The real joke was to think he could encompass it all in mere words, but he tried anyway; tried to find sense in the fragmented, loose string of moments and impressions.

As the fleet was gathering, the news had flashed around the comm channels that a massive geth armada had smashed through to the Citadel, led by a titanic black dreadnought. Then something occurred that never had before, ever in the history of Council rule- the relays themselves shut down.

No one except Admiral Hackett and the crew of the _Normandy_ could possibly imagine what was happening. Even then, for all anyone knew, Shepard was still far away on Ilos, fighting Saren and his plan for the mysterious Conduit. For long minutes, the amassed Alliance fleet floundered, trapped countless light-years from the Citadel.

Then, out of nowhere, Shepard. On a tightbeam transmission from the Citadel.

There wasn't time to question how. Joker could remember the sense of anticipation building to a fever pitch as the fleet crowded the re-awakening relay; all hands to battle stations, a-grav generators off-lined to save on heat, GARDIAN laser arrays primed, kinetic barriers to full. The approach was textbook- it was only everything after that that went to hell. The Alliance Fleet burst out of the relay en masse, straight into the teeth of a pitched battle.

The joint-fleet war-games held nine months previous were a border skirmish compared to what they jumped into. Ahead of the _Normandy_, a turian frigate, engines failing, sailed into the _SSV Thermopylae_. As the ships tore apart, flashes of igniting fuel and atmosphere picked out tiny humanoid shapes flailing and freezing in the vacuum. Every comm channel came alive in a cacophony of alien voices. Through it, Admiral Hackett's voice shouted for turian friend-foe transponder data and geth target designations.

The geth were a swarm of insectile shapes buzzing around the _Destiny Ascension_. And there, Sovereign, a cancerous black growth on the Citadel Tower itself. Each lash of its tentacular arms sent a bright lance burning out into the Nebula, slicing apart every ship it touched. Desperate cries echoed across the comms and cut off as the ships sundered, their ablative plating boiling uselessly away under the Reaper's dreadful beams.

Joker reduced it all to abstraction, a cloud of dots through which he wove the _Normandy_. He had to. There wasn't time to contemplate it on any other level, to process every ship transponder that went red for catastrophic failure, every fighter that winked out. He stayed engaged in a constant stream of back-and-forth with Pressley and his gunnery officers as he urged the frigate through the mayhem of disruptor torpedoes, mass accelerator fire and flying debris. Sprays of superheated sodium droplets made sparkling fan-tails as ships struggled to vent heat build-up from the battle while maintaining evasive manoeuvres.

He couldn't pay attention to the fact that four people from his graduating class were on board the _SSV Cape Town_ when it took critical damage to its anti-proton containment field. There was barely enough left of the cruiser afterward to haul back to Arcturus for study. He couldn't stop to wonder at the spectacle of the Citadel's Wards actually moving, the massive station opening like a flower in the sun. Would that he could have been watching when Hackett's flagship, the dreadnought _Everest_, opened up with all guns. Dreadnoughts were primarily meant as deterrents against each other and outside forces; did the admiral ever imagine he would live to give the order 'fire at will'? Joker heard later how Sovereign's lance cut through a turian dreadnought, how the running lights flickered as the capital ship died, its spine sliced in half. The survivors spun in darkness for two days, floating in escape pods and behind sealed bulkheads before being found in the Nebula and rescued.

Most of them, anyway. Some of them were still out there, in the ever-widening circle of debris drifting away from the Citadel. Like a ripple on a pond, they would travel outward for all time. Joker wondered if, like an archaeologist digging down through a thousand years of silt, you flew out fifty thousand years worth of drift, would you find the debris of the Prothean fleet's last stand?

What must it have been like for Admiral Hackett, forced to watch his fleet get chopped to pieces by those implacable super-lasers while he faced the decision to fight or flee. At the time, no one but Shepard's team knew what his decision truly meant- abandoning the Citadel to Sovereign would have had consequences far worse than they could have imagined. Consequences that, to this day, few people understood.

Then, Sovereign convulsed. Many would try to take credit for it, but from Alenko's story of what had happened in the Tower, Joker would learn that at that moment, the Reaper's glowing avatar thrashed and died under the ground team's massed gunfire. On the bridge of the _Normandy_, Joker pulled the frigate around, weaving through the drifting hulk of a turian cruiser and firing his main gun at Sovereign's body.

Nothing, he imagined, would ever again come close to the feeling in his chest when that hunk of depleted uranium punched into the Reaper's body, tearing away slabs of blue-black metal.

The news flashed through the comms- Sovereign's impenetrable shields had failed. At that moment, even the emptiness of space seemed to reverberate with the roar of triumph as the battered Citadel-allied forces opened fire on the stricken leviathan in a breaking wave. A wolf-pack of Alliance frigates unleashed their Javelin torpedo systems, and blooms of dark energy distortions exploded along Sovereign's hull. Into those warping tears, the _Destiny Ascension_ and the _Everest_ fired their main cannons, mercilessly pounding the titanic Reaper.

As Sovereign died, limbs breaking away and body fragmenting, Joker remembered the Reaper's words. _We are each a nation_. It felt strange, later, to contemplate his role in destroying an entity that had outlived stars, an intelligence of such breadth that it measured its sense of self against that of billions of organic individuals. But he felt nothing for it, only satisfaction at some measure of revenge, revenge for the death of a single, insignificant organic being. He wasn't proud of the feeling. Nor was he proud of the dark thought that nestled deep in the secret recesses of his mind, against every bully and naysayer that had ever sneered at him and his dream of flying. The one that curdled in darkness, gnawing on the survivor's guilt.

_I showed you all._

Somewhere in the middle of the rambling story, Joker broke off in mid-sentence, a chill prickle crawling over his skin as he looked at Jin. The silence seemed to swell to swallow even the rumbling of the recyc machine. A minute dragged by, then another, and Joker just stared. He searched for some sign of life, but in a way he already knew that some essential thing had fled the corporal. The man was utterly still in a way that no living being could be. The mild-mannered, personable and talkative human was gone, replaced by a shell, a mannequin. A broken engine cooling on the concrete. A leaden feeling spread through Joker's limbs, and his mouth went dry.

A sound drew his gaze across the room. The orange-striped service robot trundled through the door, then charted a careful course around the strewn bodies, heavy wheels rolling through the pooling blood. Leaving long, gory streaks along the floor, the robot approached the stack of plastic ingots and extended its thick claws, grasping the top of the stack and rolling it back into its hopper. Joker watched in numb silence as the machine helped itself to more ingots, cross-stacking them neatly on its back.

Suddenly, he caught the faint sound of the cargo elevator door. Rousing himself, Joker snatched the pistol and shuffled away from Jin's body. He silently cursed his inability to move with any real speed, and pressed himself into a gap between an oblong duct and a stack of metal. There was a grinding sound above him as the plant ejected a pressed block and conveyed it out to the warehouse to cool, washing him with heat.

His heart sank when two figures appeared, a man and a woman, wearing dark civilian clothes of a fashionable cut. Both brandished snub-nosed SMGs- weapons that didn't carry the raw power of a full assault rifle, but were still capable of a high rate of fire. The woman's gun mounted a grenade rail under the barrel.

They passed Joker's hiding place as they approached Jin's body, talking to each other in Cantonese. The pilot wasn't running his translator, but he caught a few words, none of which were complimentary. The woman knelt down and turned Jin's head to examine the back of his neck. Under his short shirtsleeves, the man bore a shock of colorful tattoos on his arms, accented in electro-luminescent ink. A blue-faced Chinese demon spread over his elbow leered at Joker, its glittering eyes following him as the thug fingered his weapon.

A terrifying reality became clear; Joker had no real cover. The two thugs had walked past him, but the minute they turned around, they would see him. Part of him was surprised they hadn't already, his hammering heartbeat seemed to him to be drowning out the rumbling recyc machine.

Demon Elbow made some comment that made the woman laugh, and she pushed herself to her feet, sparing the body a disparaging kick. Joker thumbed the safety off the pistol, which slid open on silent servos. His palm was slick against the rough grip as he raised the gun. In a feeling not unlike what he sometimes experienced at the helm of a ship, time seemed to slow. The man's weight shifted as he started to turn, and Joker realized he wasn't going to be granted the time to think it over. There were times in a dogfight where it just boiled down to who shot first.

Demon Elbow never turned around- two rounds vanished into his black hair, and a convulsion traveled up his spine. The woman started to turn, her eyes wide as her SMG came up. Joker switched targets, but in his haste he aimed wide, the first shot sparking off the far wall. The SMG made an awful noise as it burst to life.

Joker's weak legs saved his life. The woman had good reflexes, but she anticipated her attacker would be standing, not hunched in a corner near the floor, and the rounds bored into the hulking machinery above his head in a chattering howl. In an instant of terrified instinct, Joker abandoned the clean but difficult head-shot and aimed for her torso, pulling the trigger as fast as the gun's internal mechanism would allow.

The pistol hissed and bucked as the heat sink vanes snapped out the sides. He took a few more pulls at the trigger before his brain caught up to the situation. Demon Elbow flopped to the ground without a sound, but the woman swayed in place, staring at him with wordless shock. She made a weak attempt to bring her gun up again, but her arms didn't seem to work properly. She staggered a few steps, then collapsed, her mouth working like a beached fish.

Joker jumped as the service robot suddenly rounded the corner and rocked to an abrupt halt. A tinny voice came forth from somewhere in its chassis, speaking in Cantonese, then Mandarin, then English. "So sorry, please clear the path."

The robot waited patiently as the woman gasped her last breath and died with a gurgling sigh. It repeated its request.

"Just go away!" Joker snapped, brandishing the steaming pistol.

It was idiotic, but the robot seemed to comply. Without comment, it reversed course, rotated on the spot then trundled back around the corner. Trembling with adrenaline, Joker crawled out of the alcove and pulled himself up on the machine. He stopped and looked over the three bodies on the ground.

"S- Sorry," he mumbled lamely.

He couldn't think of anything else to say or do. He just wanted to get away from the empty corpses. He shuffled along the machinery until he caught sight of the cargo elevator door, which still stood open. Easing himself down on a jutting support bracket, he stared at the open doorway, his mind jumping erratically as he tried to process everything.

A chill feeling washed over him. What if Shepard and the others were dead? It seemed absurd, impossible that anyone could get the drop on her, but the thought nagged at him. They were unarmored and probably outnumbered, and sometimes all the skill in the world didn't help if you walked into a bad situation. After a moment, the feeling coalesced into an entirely new thought. The most he'd ever expected from a CO was the space to fly like he knew he could, and he'd still had to work for every inch of respect ever given to him. But the possibility that Shepard, a decorated commando, considered him in any other capacity than a particularly mouthy chauffeur made him a bit light-headed.

_She thinks you can handle it._

The pilot felt a stab of envy for the service robot; its inelegant body was perfectly suited to its singular task, without wasted appendages or weakness. The brainless beast would never feel doubt, never wonder what it was doing with its life.

He sighed, and looked down at the pistol, which shivered with the shocked tremor in his hands. The cooling sinks had retracted into the cowling, and the gun remained open and ready.

"I don't know if you're watching, Ash," Joker said sourly to the room at large, "but... you must be laughing your ass off right now."


	8. Dependant

The chair was a prison. He couldn't remember the exact day he decided he wasn't going to submit to that warden's orders anymore, that he was damn well going to be upright like all the other hairless apes called humans. It didn't happen overnight, but at length, he built his upper body strength up enough that he could get around credibly well with crutches. Not that his parents were very happy about it. That new distance off the ground was a few more Newtons of force to slam him back down into it, a few more procedures to add to the medical bill. In his world, you could calculate the monetary value of inches.

As a child, he was only dimly aware of the conflict in his household. Later, when he actually had to learn to deal with adult things like money and taxes himself, he finally came to understand what had been going on behind closed doors. His illness cost his parents everything they had. They weren't wealthy people, and all those tests and surgeries and trips from specialist to specialist slowly drained them away. With every test, every break, money went the way of hope.

He never forgot the wistful looks his parents got when someone talked about having a family. They'd dreamed of another child, but after him they'd never dared risk that elusive recessive gene. The sadness that sometimes crept onto his mother's face at the mention of children made his guts churn. At various times there was hopeful talk of donor IVF and genetic therapy, but these conversations always trailed away to the same conclusion. Yet more money. Designer babies were simply out of reach for his parents' modest salaries. Even another normal child might have been too much for their strained finances, never mind another baby born crushed in several places.

It took Joker a while to come around and realize they did everything they could to give him a decent life on meager means, but good intentions didn't erase the resentment he'd built up over years of being shut away. They would have been content if he'd simply lived with them for the rest of his days, safely tucked inside four padded walls. Safely declared 'dependent' on his parents' tax forms.

The tree had taunted him since he was a child. Its limbs sprouted thick and strong from a short trunk. In the spring, it grew small pink flowers, and in fall, those turned into small, sour-tasting apples. When they finally fell, they were food for the many bugs and worms, growing mushy and splattering under the lawn mower. Fed by a yearly supply of shredded apples, the grass under the tree grew thick and lush.

It was a tree for climbing.

Later they would accuse him of being rash, but the truth was it represented years of wishing and planning. The day was cool and breezy. The sky was overcast, but the sun was harsh on his pale skin, and he preferred the cover of lazy clouds. The air smelled of dampness, mossy and green.

He went about it with methodical care. His crutches were leaned against the lower trunk, hooked neatly over a twig to keep them upright. Each step was carefully considered, sticking to a free-climber's mantra- three points of good grip before you reach out for the next one. There was a thrill of gratification that swelled in him as he moved further away from the ground, relying only on his once traitorous body. All of the effort he'd put into being able to support himself with his arms was paying off. Perfectly planned and executed, he made it high into the tree's stout branches, and only there succumbed to the dizzying terror of the sheer, surely fatal drop.

There had been near hysteria when they'd found him, but it had all washed over him, skipping off the adrenal rush. The memory he clung to was the change in his father's voice, the way a curious pride kept leaking into his admonishment.

Such a ridiculous idea it was, when he'd first thought of it. A cripple like him, in the _military_? The very idea of it was absurd. Except the military provided medical services, even gene therapy. With enough years of service, a lifetime of coverage with some of the best medical technology the Alliance had to offer. Could it finally tack those two extra letters to the front of the hated 'dependant'?

Twiggy, fragile little Jeff Moreau spent night after night in front of the Extranet terminal, reading about the Alliance Navy and Admission Special Exceptions.

* * *

Joker stared at the elevator panel for what felt like a long time. The war in his head was ongoing, a clamor of voices extolling various plans.

The easiest choice was just... to leave. It was a strange option to have. Space was made up of closed systems, where every path that led away quickly ended back where you started. Earth was a different way of thinking- you could walk out a door and fade into several billion people, walk for your entire life and never once retread your steps.

He could make a reasonably accurate prediction of how long it would take from stepping out onto the street to being back in space, speeding away from the planet altogether. They wouldn't blame him for it, either. Maybe that was the worst part. He had a built-in excuse for cowardice, something that magically transformed it into practicality. With flippant ease, he could dismiss his entire existence as more of a liability than an asset.

The elevator panel was a labyrinthine menu display. The elevator was connected to the entire service section of the arcology tower, the invisible arteries that kept the tower clean and functional, kept the essentials flowing and whisked the garbage away. Joker scratched his chin, trying to remember the strange name Jin had used.

"Leu... Lech..." he muttered experimentally.

The elevator heard him. The pilot frowned as the menu changed, producing a long list of L-names. Part of him was disappointed. The helpful VI was winnowing away another excuse, if a lousy one. He pared down the selection to businesses only, searched for the words with a T in the middle.

He was aware that at any second, someone could press a call button, and a distant VI subsytem would decide that his car was the closest. Then he might end up somewhere else entirely in the vast tower, saddled with the exciting task of explaining to a maintenance worker what he was doing in the service system with a machine gun.

Joker spotted the name, with its Germanic, throat-clearing profusion of consonants. Leuchtturm. He wondered idly what it meant. It appeared on a short list of names attached to a particular service level.

"This is _so_ stupid." He reached out and touched the icon.

The heavy door whirred closed and the ground under his feet pushed up against him as the elevator started up. There was nothing to look at but the small progress map of the display as it cycled through floors. Joker clenched his jaw against the nervous chatter that kept trying to creep into his muscles. He distracted himself by looking over the SMG he'd liberated from the woman he'd killed. It kicked hard when he'd fired it experimentally, but he couldn't bring himself to leave it behind. If not for the gun itself, than for the single frag grenade nestled under the barrel. Small, but effective. The gun had a strap which he slung over his shoulder.

Something in Joker's brain seemed to have made the decision on its own; sent him to fetch the gun and then marched him back to the elevator of its own volition. The pilot had a distinct feeling that he hadn't really been consulted on the matter. All those other ideas about fleeing had only been entertained with indulgent condescension by the voice that reached out and, against all good sense, sent him_ toward_ the many more thugs with guns.

The same voice that had once propelled his fragile ass up a tree so many years ago, and signed his name on an application to the Alliance Navy. In his head, he dressed up that voice in a certain athletic body clad in dark armor, and wearing a perpetual amused smirk to challenge his own.

"I'm just a damn cripple pilot," he said to the phantom Ashley, "you're going to get me killed."

The humming elevator did not deign to respond. In Joker's head, that smirk turned into a predatory grin. The car came to a none-too-gentle-stop and the doors whirred open, revealing a hallway beyond that was the same nondescript white as the one lower down. The air was cooler, and there was a slight pressure difference against his eardrums.

There was no one either human or otherwise in the hallway. Joker shuffled out of the elevator and cast about for some hint as to where he was going. There appeared to be service doors along the walls set at wide intervals, but nothing helpful in the sign department. He made his way to the closest door. All there was beside it was a plaque stamped with an obscure set of numbers, probably a unit number for the tower.

The next door along was the same. The hallway curved on with depressing sameness, and Joker was starting to despair at ever magically finding the right door when he spotted something off. On the next door, the lock panel had been pulled away from the mounting and badly reset, hanging askew. The wall was dimpled with what looked like gunshot impacts.

"Subtle, guys," he muttered with a smirk.

With an excessively surreptitious look both ways, he pushed the door open and slipped inside. Within, a deck of badly spaced emergency lighting threw long shadows around a utility room. Shelves lined the walls, loaded with bottles and boxes of all shapes and sizes. Two large panels bore waste signs, one of which was a large red biohazard symbol. A sizable rack housed a set of small maintenance robots, which were probably set to emerge at night and tidy up the crumbs left by the office's human occupants.

Underneath the garbage chutes, a body was laid out on the floor, hands curled into the claw-like grip of death. Joker froze when he spotted it, then peered carefully around the room. There was another body against the wall further in, hunched over in a sitting position. The pilot gingerly edged closer.

Suddenly the seated body moved. It drew its legs in and tried to pull itself up, raising its head. A remarkably young face framed with wild hair peered at Joker in the gloom.

"Don't get excited," Joker said warningly, pulling the pistol out of his waistband.

The man stopped, then slid back down, eyes wary. The pilot realized the thugs' hands were bound behind him, pinning him to a metal siding attached to the wall. Veins stood out in the overdeveloped muscles of his bare arms.

"You're... with _Shepard..._" the thug said, pronouncing the name as if it were a contagious disease. The beginnings of an impressively black eye purpled his face.

"Only in the loosest sense of the term," Joker quipped. He sidled past the man, staying out of reach of his feet. There was precious little space.

The thug watched with suspicion. "Do you think she'll save you?"

The pilot glanced back. "Well, I've saved _her_ a few times, does that count?"

A flicker of confusion crossed the man's face, then his expression hardened. "How can you betray your own people?_ They're _the aliens' pawns!"

"Are you for real?" Joker raised an eyebrow. "You sound like a bad Terra Firma propaganda vid turned up to eleven."

"I know the truth! Her kind will be the damnation of us all! Slavery of the whole of humanity to the aliens! Every day they infect us with-"

"Look, I've heard it all before. Why don't you save your breath?"

The thug's eyes glittered with unthinking certitude. "While I have breath in my body, I'll fight! The alien agents have been poisoning our air! Every year more filthy mutants are born, and the ones that don't die, they tell us to put _implants_ into their brains! Soon they'll be putting the implants into all of us!"

"To control our minds, right?" Joker offered.

The thug's face lit up with triumph. "Yes! One by one, they'll-"

"You're like the red-headed stepchild of your little club, aren't you?" Joker broke in. "The FNG who bought into everything on the pamphlet, and now won't shut the hell up? Is that why they stuck you out here to guard the garbage chute? Boy, you must have shit a brick when _the_ scary biotic of the newsvids came through that door."

The thug stumbled over his tirade, staring at Joker with open-mouthed shock. "That... that vile witch-"

"Kicked your ass, I can see that. You're lucky to be alive, pal. She probably didn't think you were even worth shaving a few rounds off her ammo slug."

The man lurched, trying again to pull against his bonds and get to his feet. Joker swung the gun down hard on the man's temple. The jolt flashed up his arm and the thug flopped back to the ground, his head lolling on his neck. He blinked stupidly.

"Why don't you sit down and take a minute to think about your life?" Joker quipped, feeling a surge of petulant satisfaction. "I have things to do."

As he moved away through the shelves, he could almost hear Ashley's mocking voice. _Ooh, good one, you took out a guy who was unarmed and tied down. Next maybe we'll move you up to a paraplegic!_

The utility area ran up to a sliding door, and once again the lock had been pulled off its mountings. The portal was open a sliver, but beyond was dark. It also appeared to have no power. Joker set his shoulder against the edge of the door and shoved, and it slid open along silent runners.

Within, someone had shut off the power to the offices, and the hallways were filled with shadows. Joker quickly shut the door behind him and waited in the dark, listening, and letting his eyes adjust. It didn't take long to hear the sounds of a fight come filtering to him, bouncing off the walls. The rattle of gunfire should have been worrying, but instead he found himself heartened- his friends were still out there.

"I must be going nuts," he muttered quietly.

He shouldered the awkward SMG and shuffled away from the door, searching the darkness for potentially hostile shadows. He passed a doorway, then another. A quick peek inside showed the dim outlines of office spaces and what looked like some kind of lab equipment. Just as he was poking his head into a third door, he heard a noise coming from further up the hall.

Joker pressed himself into the shadows of the doorway and waited. Three shapes skulked down the hallway, weapons drawn. They passed his hiding place, their faces intent on the sounds echoing down the corridor. The one in the lead appeared to be wearing light body armor, and, Joker suspected, the attendant kinetic barrier.

The pilot chewed his lip. Even with the element of surprise, taking out three of them with the pistol was probably impossible. The second the tide turned in their favor, he was finished. After months on the _Normandy_, his own body's lack of speed and maneuverability was galling.

But those three were probably on their way to a flanking position.

"We'll have none of that," Joker mouthed to himself. "Bring on the stupid."

He eased into the doorway and set the SMG against his shoulder. Methodically, he thumbed the safety off and took aim at the wall next to the thugs, then squeezed the secondary trigger.

The rail mounted on the gun ejected the grenade with a hiss, and the recoil shoved his shoulder into the doorjamb. There was the briefest flash as the grenade skipped off the wall, then it detonated with a sharp _crump_. The hallway erupted into sparks, throwing the outlines of the thugs into a strobe of sharp relief. Joker's clothes ruffled around him as the pressure wave washed back down the hall.

For a second, an eerie quiet hung in the air. Then, a pained cry rose from the darkness, setting Joker's teeth on edge. Much as he would have liked to be sure of the results, his sense of tactics told him he simply couldn't afford to stay where he had so loudly announced his presence. There was no way he'd win a direct confrontation, so the only option was to hit and run.

Such as it was. Joker ducked into the room behind him, heading for the door on the far side. He bumped into chair in the dark and cursed quietly. On impulse, he dropped the SMG. A gun he couldn't really control was little use to him anyway, and it got in the way when he was trying to move. As if to justify his paranoia, a burst of wild gunfire chattered across the open doorway behind him, dimpling the walls. He flinched and bit off another obscenity, shuffling between the desks as fast as his arms would take him.

"_So_ stupid," he muttered breathlessly as he forced the door open and peeked out.

It opened into a landing. To his right, a set of stairs led up to a switchback, dimly lit by a glowing emergency pad. The sounds of the wounded gang members filtered around the corner to his left, where the short landing joined the same hallway. The smell of explosives eddied in the air.

Joker's choices were limited to hanging out in the hall with wounded and probably irate gangers, not to mention whoever else the blast attracted, or stairs.

"I hate you all," he growled at the empty flight, then gritted his teeth and started up.

The thought that he was killing people floated through his head. Up until now, he'd always dealt with violence in an abstract sense. It happened far away, filtered through computers and presented as sensor scans, probabilities and statistics. Whether or not he'd ever been directly responsible for a person's death before now was an open question, and he liked it that way. He didn't count the geth, and he wasn't sure the ships he'd gunned down over the Citadel were even crewed in the conventional sense or not.

It was a sick feeling. But the adrenaline ran hot in his veins- he pushed it all back down, reciting a mental list of Cerberus' atrocities and capping it with Jin's death. Joker speculated idly that if one of the Fists found his discarded weapon, they might wonder if it was one of their own who had fired the grenade at them. Perhaps they would get into a fight. By the time he'd muscled his way to the top of the staircase, he decided he could bear the suffering of Cerberus' hired goons with great fortitude.

The top of the stairs opened up onto another landing. Joker shuffled quickly out of the dim light as he tried to catch his breath. He listened intently to the scattered noises of gunfire, but it was hard to make out exactly where they were coming from as they bounced around the pillared hallways. Once again, the space seemed to be lined with offices. The pilot made his way along the hall to a corner and peeked around it. Dim, slanting light illuminated a railing where the hallway opened out of the left side to a well leading down.

A shadow suddenly detached itself from the railing, and Joker lurched back in surprise, flattening himself against the darkened wall and holding his breath. Mercifully, the figure didn't seem to notice him as the Fist raised his arms and fired over the railing to unseen targets down below. The muted light gleamed off the slick surface of a light armored vest. The man ducked back down just as a hail of return fire rained sparks off the ceiling. In a crouch, he started moving closer to Joker, his face intent on the space down below.

The thug was alone, but was also armored and probably shielded. Attacking him was a gamble at best. As the Fist gunman drew closer, Joker ran his thumb over his pistol's grip, raising the muzzle. Cornered in his shadow, his options were running out again.

There was the sound of approaching footsteps, coming at a quick jog. A woman emerged from the darkened hallway at the opposite end and dropped to a crouch next to the first thug. Joker heard urgent whispers, then the man straightened up to peek over the railing. He looked back down, fussing with something the woman had handed him, then raised himself to look back out. His arm came up, holding something round.

Joker recognized the pattern of tiny lights with a chill. It was a military-grade disc grenade, packed with high explosive. Much more powerful than the one he'd used downstairs.

Between his small pistol and the kinetic barriers, there wasn't a reliable killshot to be had. Joker instead aimed at the spinning lights and fired. A blueish shimmer flickered in the air as the thug's kinetic barrier reacted, and the man flinched as Joker fired several more times, his entire focus trained on tracking those tiny lights. The whites of the woman's wide eyes flashed as the grenade flipped out of the man's grip.

Joker hobbled backward a step and then flung himself around the corner. He managed to marshal the presence of mind of clap his hands over his ears just as the floor jumped violently beneath him, accompanied by a thunderous bang. The rebounding pressure wave hit him in the chest, forcing the air out of his lungs. Dust filled the air, raining down from the ceiling. Joker drew a harsh breath, then coughed. For a few moments, he squirmed on the floor as his ringing brain fought to catch up with the situation.

He blinked, trying to clear his eyes as he pawed the ground for his crutches. The floor panels had all sprung loose, and they shifted as he pulled himself to his feet. He was looking around for the pistol when footsteps ground in the debris-covered floor. Joker looked over to see the Fist woman come staggering around the corner. Her eyes were wild, face covered with blood. Strands of her black hair had fallen out of her ponytail, and her armor was slashed in multiple places.

She froze when she spotted the pilot.

Joker backed into the buckled wall behind him. "Hi," he said idiotically, "didn't I kill you?"

For a heartbeat, she just stared at him. The floor under his feet creaked. Just as he began to have serious misgivings about the structure holding him over what was at least a two-story drop, the woman's face contorted with predatory rage. She reached behind her back and withdrew a long combat dagger with a steely hiss.

"Can't we-" Joker started, but the woman vaulted over a fallen beam and charged him.

The knife made a whistling sound as it whipped toward him in a wide slashing arc. On impulse, Joker pulled one of his crutches up to horizontal. The blunt end took the woman high in the sternum, sharply arresting her charge and jolting him hard as the opposite end right under his shoulder slammed into the wall behind him.

The whistle didn't stop. Pain exploded in the middle of his face. In the same instant, the crack of parting concrete resounded in his ears, and the support behind him gave way.

In his life, Joker had tried to stay philosophical about the many things that could kill him.

But he never really shook the simple terror of falling.


	9. Sides

Instants could drag in strange ways. They always did the moment before disaster, as if the human brain was determined to make sure the loose collection of meat it governed fully appreciated what was about to happen. Or to allow a person to make a thousand assumptions, each worse than the last. Joker's subconscious had hours of practice in elaborating on all the messy ways he could die.

Except something went strange. The sense of wrongness didn't penetrate very far into the bright lance of pain that tried to overwhelm every corner of Joker's mind, even as his body instinctively flailed in desperation against the sudden void. He had only a heartbeat to contemplate it before his shoulder and head slammed into something hard, and sparks and darkness filled his vision. He slid against a rough surface as a cacophony of shattering concrete and twisting metal filled the air.

But the final impact that was supposed to end everything didn't happen. Instead, something clamped around his chest and dragged. He tried to inhale, but no air came in. His throat and chest refused to cooperate, his mouth filled with liquid. A spasm of red-hot panic shot through his nerves.

Instead of ending abruptly, the feeling of falling leaked away until Joker realized he lay on a hard surface. He coughed, a harsh bark that brought a pulse of pain throughout his head, but something let go and in the next instant, a gulp air abruptly flooded back into his lungs. He squirmed and tried to suck in oxygen, spitting out the liquid filling his mouth. His lungs felt raw and shallow, his ribs aching with every heave. Something pinned him to the floor, holding him on his side. Earsplitting gunfire cracked the air close by.

"Joker! Calm down!" a voice said. "You're inhaling blood. Breathe through your mouth!"

The familiar tone cut through the panic and agonizing pain. The pilot kept his eyes tightly shut and concentrated on getting air past the liquid flow.

"Stay still," the voice said.

Joker tried weakly to recoil from the rough touch that pulled his chin around. There was a sharp flare of pain and pressure, then a sudden cooling wash flowed out from between his eyes. He recognized the analgesic touch of medi-gel. The sensation of liquid flowing down the back of his throat stopped.

The weight on his shoulder went away. Joker drew himself up into a ball, shuddering. It felt like everything hurt, but the panic began to subside and he could breathe cleanly.

He cautiously peeled his eyes open, and his hands swam into view. As he focused on them, he felt a rush of relief. Against his worst fears, his most precious things in all the world seemed to have survived unharmed. He flexed his fingers, then peered up to see Alenko crouched next to him, a snub-nosed SMG lying nearby. The ground was littered with dust and concrete fragments, stained here and there with crimson. The lieutenant was looking out into the room as scattered reports of gunfire echoed back to them.

A tense silence finally fell. Joker raised a tentative hand to the hot, dull throb in the middle of his face. With every heartbeat he could feel the blood pulsing through the swollen flesh.

"You got cut across the bridge of your nose," Alenko explained, glancing down. "Through the cartilage, it was bleeding back into your mouth and you choked on it. Is anything else hurt?" He reached out toward Joker's legs.

Joker pulled away out of reflex. "M'fine," he mumbled, pushing himself up to a sitting position. He tested his trembling limbs. His legs felt as battered and scraped as the rest of him, but there wasn't the knife-like pain of a broken bone mixed in.

Alenko looked concerned, but backed off, settling himself against the cracked wall. It appeared to be a two-story entry hall, open to the railings upstairs where Joker had seen the two thugs with the grenade. Shepard strode out of a darkened hallway, shotgun in hand, and crossed the scattered debris.

"Why the hell did you do that to me?" Joker croaked accusingly, cutting her off before she could say anything.

Shepard looked down at him. "What_ I _did to _you_?"

"You... you left," Joker blurted. "I couldn't help Jin, all I could do was sit there and crack stupid jokes while he died!"

The commander blinked, then sank slowly to one knee beside him. "You did exactly what I hoped you'd do," she said, looking Joker in the eye.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean? You knew he was going to die, didn't you?"

Shepard sighed heavily.

"Wide dispersal shotgun," Alenko cut in, his voice subdued, "shredded every major organ in his torso. I'm surprised he hung on as long as he did. Medi-gel is wonderful stuff, but it isn't magic."

"He knew what was coming," Shepard said.

The pilot stared at her, the horror of it closing his throat.

"Look, Joker," the commander went on, "all of us who do this job know that moment is coming for us, somewhere down the line. We have our gallows humor, our ways of denying and ignoring it, but it never goes away. And we all know... that it'll probably come when we're in some dark, godforsaken hole, alone and afraid. But because you stayed behind, Jin didn't have to go that way."

Joker dropped his gaze.

"They were trying to liquidate this place. If we'd waited, we'd have lost them." Shepard squeezed his shoulder. "I'm just glad you're in one piece."

Suddenly a man in a white lab coat came stumbling into the room on the far side. Tennyson strode in on his heels, his face drawn into a thunderous scowl. Shepard stood up and moved away to approach them.

"I hope you have a flaming fantastic explanation for why you're up to your armpits in Fist busybodies," the admiral snapped.

The man looked around wildly at the shattered architecture. "It isn't... I was being threatened! It's those gangsters-"

"Bullshit! Your lab keeps floating to the surface of my investigations, Martin, and now I track an attack on a biotic marine right back to your doorstep! You were in this from the beginning, weren't you?"

The scientist paled and swallowed. "I was under orders," he said in a shaken voice.

Tennyson blinked. "Orders? Whose? You were discharged six years ago, man!"

"I... Not completely."

The admiral's scowl deepened. "_Whose_ orders?"

"I can't say."

"Like hell you can't!"

The man's face became pleading. "They'll bankrupt me, Adam, I-"

"This is the sound of my sympathy disappearing," the admiral growled ominously as the cowling on his assault rifle pulled back with a soft whir.

The man retreated a step. "They said... they said they were losing control of their assets-"

"_Assets_?" Tennyson roared. "They're _people_, Martin! You're _killing_ them! You cost me a goddamn N! How does that fit into your model of gainful use of _assets_?"

"It wasn't supposed to be like that," Martin stammered. "I was told to synthesize a compound... it wasn't fatal..."

"Oh my, no! Only the guns they resorted to in order to put down the biotics who were secretly drugged up against their will!"

"But don't you see? I had no choice. There _have_ to be controls and checks in place, or else it could happen anywhere! They're invisible, Tennyson! This is the only way to protect the rest of us from-"

His speech was abruptly cut short by Tennyson's broad fist, which connected with the scientist's jaw with a sharp crack. Martin flew back and landed in a sprawling heap.

Shepard stepped swiftly between them. "Interrogations go better without having to do it through broken jaws, Tenny," she said.

Tennyson rocked on balls of his feet, glaring at her, then stepped back. "You _always_ had a choice," he said over her shoulder to the dazed man. "And you know damn well where you crossed the line!"

He wrung his hand and collapsed his assault rifle as Shepard roughly pulled the scientist's arms behind his back and lashed his hands together with a tie.

Joker crawled carefully over and sat against the wall next to the lieutenant. The pilot looked around the darkened room, at the shadowy forms of bodies, the blast marks and gunfire-riddled walls. "We're still the good guys, right?" he said after a moment.

Alenko grimaced. "Not to hear _them_ rant about it..." he said darkly, thrusting his chin in the direction of the dead Fist thugs.

"I meant-"

"I know what you meant." The lieutenant's face was dark with fatigue, and a layer of black stubble covered his jaw. He looked haggard; gore-streaked and weary.

"They're just a bunch of idiots who need someone to hate to make themselves feel better," Joker said. "Who cares what they think?"

Alenko sighed. His eyes had a haunted cast to them. "I can't help it. I know it's out there... but I don't go swimming in it very often. And no, before you ask, killing them doesn't make me feel better. It just makes me exactly what they're all afraid of." He spread his bloody fingers, and the air around them wavered with the faintest blue shimmer.

Joker stilled the flicker of discomfort at the sight of the dark energy. He hated the feeling, the instinctual voice of wrongness that fought with conscious logic. It was the same germ of discomfort of the unknown that bred the bigotry he'd faced in his own life. It was easy for the pilot to brush off the words of the man tied up in the back room- his opinions were offensively ignorant, but they didn't hit Joker where he lived. Still, he knew what it was like to be targeted directly.

"It just makes me wonder about sides, you know?" the pilot said. "Shepard, and Tennyson... The people whose orders we're following. I _think_ we're on the right side, but..."

The lieutenant heaved a long breath, swiping his hands over his pant legs. "Cerberus and the factions that support them want humanity to be the dominant force in the galaxy. They don't think our own survival will be secure until every other sentient species is safely subdued, and our own people are carefully controlled. They'll go to any lengths to achieve that. We've seen those lengths, some of us have... lived them.

"But I just don't think that's the right course, even if we _didn't_ have the Reapers breathing down our collective necks. Even... even in the face of that," he gestured to the corpses, "or maybe because of that, I don't think bathing in endless fear and suspicion is going to do good for humanity."

Joker considered it for a long moment. Across the room, Shepard and Tennyson were talking in low voices. The commander seemed to be angry about something, her eyes narrow.

"Guess that kind of breaks it down to brass tacks, doesn't it?" the pilot said finally.

"A lot of people would call me naive for it. But for every Saren there's a Garrus... and plenty more who just want to get on with their lives." Alenko's voice dropped. "We tried to claim dominion over the Earth, and it nearly destroyed us. Are we really so sure we'll do a better job with the whole galaxy?"

Joker gave a dark chuckle. "It does seem like a lot of overcompensation, doesn't it? Like we can march out there, plant a flag, and suddenly all the strangeness of the universe will fall into line for us."

Alenko nodded. "If you think about it, it's only going to get stranger as the generations pass. Colonial culture and language will diverge, and at some point, our fellow humans will start to seem alien. And then there's biotics... It's already happening. Earth is... an alien planet to someone like Shepard."

"I don't think being afraid of bugs quite qualifies her as alien just yet," Joker mused.

Alenko looked at him sidelong. "I wouldn't use the word 'afraid' within earshot if I were you."

"But it's still funny."

"How do you imagine you'd react if you'd never seen a single bug in person until your twenties?"

Joker opened his mouth, then closed it. Bugs were so ubiquitous in every corner of planet Earth, he realized he couldn't really imagine it. "That is so... _weird_."

"I know."

Joker gingerly touched his nose. He could feel the slick surface of the set medi-gel over the bridge of his nose, a cool patch in the throbbing heat of the injury. The blood on his face and soaked into his shirt was starting to dry, making for a distinctly unpleasant sensation.

"I don't know how the hell you do this job," the pilot muttered.

"Normally I have several terahertz of kinetic barriers around me, a team at my back, and only _one_ half-crazy CO to keep up with."

Joker smirked, then regretted it as a pulse of pain went through his swollen face. "For a while there this felt worse than broken bones."

"You have considerably more nerve endings in your face."

"Great. Just don't you dare give me that line about chicks digging scars," the pilot said sourly. "Because maybe they do on _you_, but I'll just look like I had a disagreement with a door."

"It'll heal up fine," Alenko assured him.

Across the room, Shepard's expression changed, looking taken aback. Joker suddenly wished he could be a fly on the wall- not many people could elicit such a reaction from the commander.

The pilot looked over at the rubble of the fallen wall section spread out over the ground. He couldn't quite reconcile the smashed concrete and the gaping hole high above with his unbroken state, until the obvious occurred to him. "You... caught me, didn't you?" he asked Alenko, wiggling his fingers in a poor imitation of a mnemonic form.

The lieutenant shrugged. "Sort of. You kind of caught me by surprise, flying out of a wall like that. I managed to dampen it, I guess."

Her expression distant, Shepard turned and left the room, shotgun perched on her shoulder. Tennyson walked over to Joker and Alenko.

"Well, Moreau," the admiral declared, "either you completely took leave of your senses, or you have balls the size of church bells. Under the circumstances, I'm willing to go with the latter."

Joker peered up at Tennyson. "At least those work, because everything else is kind of a bust."

The admiral chuckled. "Well, ill-advised or not, your assist is appreciated."

"I'm sorry about Jin," Alenko said.

Tennyson's shoulders slumped. "He was a good kid, sure as hell smarter than _me_... A solid head and a decent heart. Not enough people like him in the service. It's going to be hell to break this to his son."

"Was he married?" the lieutenant asked quietly.

"Not anymore, but he loved his boy. Kept taking assignments in the Sol system just to stay close by so he could visit." Tennyson trailed off, his eyes distant.

"You're playing a dangerous game," he said suddenly, fixing Alenko with a flinty look.

Alenko's eyes snapped up to meet the admiral's, but he kept his mouth shut in a hard line. The two men stared each other down for a long moment. Then Tennyson's expression softened, a profound world-weariness passing across his lined face.

"But I guess you know that," Tennyson continued. He wagged a finger at the lieutenant. "Whatever happens, you be straight. Don't... fuck around."

"I wouldn't!" the lieutenant snapped, squaring his shoulders defensively.

A distant crash echoed through the dim hallways. Tennyson looked around, then looked back at Alenko. "Good," the admiral pronounced with a certain finality, then picked himself up and walked toward the sound.

Bright flashlight beams cut through the shadows, dancing off the walls, followed by warning shouts. Tennyson walked to the center of it all with perfect confidence. A squad of dark-armored figures stamped with the symbol of the Hong Kong police force poured through the door, sweeping the room with their lights. The admiral held his ground, forestalling the charge with outstretched hands as he announced himself in his booming voice.

"I didn't need the alpha-male routine," Alenko muttered after a minute.

"Who else was going to do it?" Joker said pointedly. He went to scratch his chin, then stopped himself. "Look, uh, thanks for not letting me go splat."

"Just returning one of several favors," the lieutenant replied. "As you're so fond of telling us, I have a few to catch up on."

Joker frowned. Much as he delighted in reminding the marines about all the times he'd scooped them up out of a tight spot, it suddenly didn't feel like it compared at all with the visceral reality of an actual firefight. "Well, the rest can be in beer, because I don't plan on doing this again anytime soon."

The pilot watched the swirl of activity around Tennyson curiously, marvelling at how the big admiral bludgeoned the police into swift acquiescence with sheer force of personality. Given the stories that filtered back to Joker, it seemed like some of that must have rubbed off on Shepard.

Alenko chuckled quietly.

"What?" Joker asked.

"Just... the bug thing. Have you ever seen a banana slug?"

"Uh, no. Do I really want to?"

"They have them out in British Columbia. They look just about exactly how you would guess, given their name. They're about so long-" he held his fingers out, some twenty centimeters apart. "They like to hide in damp corners, under leaves, and-"

Suddenly Shepard re-appeared from the hall at the end of the room. She was carefully balancing a large bundle over her shoulder, and as she stooped to put it down, Joker realized it was Jin's wrapped body. The commander laid him out with almost tender care, spending a moment to arrange the body with a certain dignity.

"And I'll save this story for another time otherwise I might be joining you in the infirmary," Alenko finished, his voice dropping as Shepard walked toward them.

The commander stopped and regarded their twin expressions of studied innocence with a passing flicker of suspicion, then slid down beside the lieutenant. She was breathing with the exertion of carrying the body.

"Wasn't going to leave him downstairs," she said, by way of explanation.

"I could have gone..." Alenko offered.

"If I can carry _you_ in full gear, I can damn well manage Jin. Anyway, I needed you to make sure our intrepid pilot didn't get any more wild ideas." She leaned forward and eyed Joker with a raised eyebrow.

"I think I got it out of my system," Joker demurred, plucking at his sticky shirt. "The local constabulary is welcome to take it from here. So just how much trouble are we in this time?"

"If all goes well, we were never here," Shepard said. "Tenny's an old hat at the political game, and when all else fails, sheer bluster usually gets him through."

"That cop _does_ look a little shell-shocked," Joker observed.

"A rear admiral that's been in the service as long as he has can drop an awful lot of impressive-sounding names in one breath," the commander said with a smirk.

The officer in charge of the squad of police had retreated from the admiral, and was now engaged in a heated comm conversation. Tennyson stood near the bound scientist, who watched the proceedings in sullen silence. The bevy of police eyed the admiral and the assault rifle slung over his shoulder with a mixture of interest and suspicion.

"You okay?" Alenko asked Shepard quietly.

She rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. "I don't know... I guess."

"This isn't on you."

Shepard let out a long breath. In the silence that followed, it seemed some of the tension drained out of the air. The dull throb in Joker's face continued, and he was starting to feel light-headed.

"I sure as hell hope Tenny's on the ball today," Shepard said after a minute. "I have a hot date- with a shower."

"Amen," Alenko agreed fervently.

Battered and bruised, three odd ducks sitting in a row. In such company, Joker could never have quite imagined he'd ever feel so included.

* * *

It had been an office not unlike this one in which a young, frustrated, aspiring pilot had sat across from the training director, a school principle of a different stripe. Joker wondered idly if it was in fact the same office, but really, the architects of Alliance space stations were just more engineer than designer.

Vrolik's disease wasn't on the list of medical conditions generally excepted for Navy admissions. Proving himself had become a daily task so constant that even the next breath had to be better than the last. He probably could have settled for one of the thousands of desk jobs they offered, but computers didn't interest him, and pity had too sour a taste to bear for the rest of his life.

It was neither the first tirade he'd had to listen to, nor the last- the newly-christened 'Joker''s increasingly acerbic tongue did nothing to endear him to anyone. He'd bent some rules – he thought rather creatively - in order to pass zero-g certification. Micro-gravity was deceptively freeing, but also created new challenges. Parts of the certification involved doing things that were at best difficult... but not if someone adjusted the mass generator before the test even began. Favors were always for sale in any school, and Joker was a shrewd, practical negotiator.

The director wasn't interested in creativity, however. He had quotas to fulfill. The woman sitting in the corner behind him spent the entire meeting in silence, scanning a datapad, her legs crossed and her expression studious. Joker had slouched in his chair, feeling smaller and smaller as the specter of expulsion once again chilled the air in the room.

Finally, the director seemed to exhaust his invective, deflating like a balloon as he excused himself. The woman had spent a long moment looking at Joker, her gaze penetrating. She never introduced herself, but her Navy uniform lent her all the official air she needed.

Her voice had been granite._ Make no mistake, Moreau, you're an investment. The same as every kid we evaluate. You're good... I see it. But you're also fragile as hell. So, do we __spend someone's salary's __worth of credits training you, just so you can get smashed to bits the first time you pull some Gs? Then how much do we spend putting you back together?_

The sound of the datapad hitting the table sounded like a thunderclap. No one had ever talked to him like that before. Even the mockery he'd endured had a half-hearted, whispered edge to it. Not this; her words resounded through the small room, sharp and brilliant like the blade of a knife.

_You have to better than good, Moreau. You have to be a winning investment. For_ you_, that means you're going to have to be the best. If you plan on being anything less, pack your bags._

All truths were cruel in Joker's world.

Many years and a pilot's license later, the man across the desk was narrow-faced, with small eyes and knobby fingers that seemed to be in a constant game of lacing and unlacing. Captain Segura didn't have a ship to helm, so he was the dictator of this one room, which he ruled with fastidious neatness.

Joker adopted a dull, disinterested expression. People usually assumed mental infirmity came hand in hand with physical, a tendency Joker occasionally exploited to keep people off balance. Even someone who knew his reputation was often liable to fall victim to their natural prejudices, if only on a subconscious level. The pilot amused himself by counting the bolts on the far wall as the questions dragged on.

The inquiries were all about the incident in Hong Kong, now three weeks old and fading like the line across the bridge of Joker's nose. The pilot gave neutral, short answers, making the investigator work for his details.

Shepard had looked annoyed when Joker had asked her about this Segura. She'd told him only that it was some kind of investigation and to just tell the truth and get it over with. This went higher than him, and telling the weaselly man he'd been dragged along for it all was more or less true anyway. The pilot could tell Segura didn't appreciate his dullard act, but there was something satisfying about watching as he deliberately wore on each spare nerve the captain had.

Like any skilled interrogator, Segura brought his important questions out of left field.

"I have one final matter to address, Lieutenant."

"Shoot."

Segura cocked his head, his eyes narrow in an expression of oily curiosity that make Joker want to excuse himself to go take a shower. "Are you aware of any... impropriety among the senior officers of the _Normandy_?"

"Huh?" Joker said, carefully keeping surprise off his face.

The investigator drummed his fingers on his desk. "You know what I mean, Moreau."

A chilly suspicion slithered through Joker's gut. "I spend my days welded to a chair playing with blinking lights, sir. So long as they do their jobs, the crew could wear socks on their heads for all I care."

As an officer himself, it wasn't an especially intelligent thing to say to a superior, but Joker was starting to get irritated. He found himself replaying the preceding conversation in his head, searching for anything that seemed out of place.

Segura leaned forward. "Fraternization."

"I've never seen any of the command staff act unprofessionally," Joker said smoothly. It was only half a lie- in the field, Shepard was all business. As far as he was concerned, that's what mattered.

"Nothing that... might have compromised Commander Shepard's decision on Virmire?"

Joker could feel the heat of anger climbing up his throat. He kept his teeth clamped shut so nothing would escape as he stared down the other man across the table. How often had he fantasized about having a body sturdy enough to reach out and throttle somebody? But he had a new fantasy as he sat there- to reach out, and with a flick of the wrist send the offensive man across the room. What must it be like to have that power, that _option_, every day, all the time? Joker could no more imagine it than he could what it was like to run.

It wasn't that there was no temptation at all to rat out Shepard and Alenko. It was there, nestled in with the jealousy and resentment that lurked in the back of his skull like persistent mold. He could detach the thought, turn it over in his head, and see what wriggled in the dirt underneath. The suspicion coalesced.

_Fucker is trying to play me. Is that what this whole song and dance is about?_

It wasn't about what happened to Ash on Virmire, or him. Segura was digging for dirt... on Shepard.

Jin's idle comment about his oath to the Alliance came back to him then. Who did he really serve? Shepard was breaking regs, true... but did this clown have even the faintest idea of the stakes the _Normandy_ really played for? Who actually returned the loyalty Joker had pledged?

"I'm done," the pilot announced crisply, and pushed himself to his feet.

"We're not finished, Moreau!" Segura snapped.

"Ooh, yes we are," Joker retorted. "I'm not interested in sitting around fishing for slander about my crewmates. Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams died to save _both_ our sorry asses, and that's the end of _that_. You want to go after Shepard, make a fucking appointment with _her_."

"Lieutenant! You-"

"And while you're at it," Joker continued in a moment of reckless bravado, "find something heavy to hide under. Because when the lights come on, you and the rest of the Cerberus cockroaches are going to have to scuttle for your little lives!"

Joker took the opening afforded by Segura's look of open-mouthed shock to snap a jaunty salute, then turned and resolutely shuffled out the door. A rush of light-headedness washed over him as the portal hissed closed behind him. It wasn't the first time he'd told a superior officer where he could stuff it, but he hadn't ever before actually accused one of treason. It had been a wild stab in the dark... but one that might have been validated in a fleeting flinch that passed across Segura's face.

As he made his way down the hall past the other offices, Joker's shoulders itched with the now uncomfortably familiar feeling that someone might be lining up a shot to the back of his head. But as he passed the bored-looking receptionist, no troupes of black-clad agents appeared out of invisible doorways to whisk him away to a secret torture room to be subjected to electrodes and piranhas with a taste for genitalia.

The vast station unscrolled around him as he made his way toward the docking rings at his natively unhurried pace. Arcturus was as it always was- a hive of activity that bustled around him. Enlisted personnel saluted when they passed, many with genuine respect. There were few things sure in life, but Joker was sure he'd earned the uniform and rank stripes he wore as surely as if he'd woven the fibers of it together by hand. How many of these people were aware of the forces at work under the surface? How many had chosen a side? Far fewer, the pilot suspected, than the those who simply followed the orders given to them without any deeper insight. Joker wasn't sure that _his_ new insight made things any easier, though.

The _Normandy_'s sloping, turian nose was, as always, a welcome sight. The flight vanes tucked at her flanks had come to remind him of Garrus' mandibles, flaring when the avian alien was agitated. The lingering itch of paranoia faded as Joker stepped into the airlock. The VI's robotic voice announced the beginning of the decontamination procedure.

"I missed you too, baby," Joker crooned, smiling a lover's smile as the beam washed over him.

"Decontamination complete," the VI said.

The pilot clucked his tongue. "Always so cold... But don't worry, I love you anyway."

His ears popped a bit at the slight pressure change as the inner door hissed open. He shuffled through the portal into the hallway and spotted Engineer Adams seated in the copilot's chair.

"Afternoon, Adams," Joker said amiably as he came around his one and only favorite seat in all the galaxy.

"Where have you been?" Adams asked, looking up. "We have a huge checklist to go over, and I'd like to get out of here before they roll up the sidewalks station-side. I've been cooped up in the service gantries since we docked, and I need to stretch my legs."

"I had to stop in and insult someone," Joker replied, easing himself into the pilot's chair with a grateful sigh. He folded up his crutches and stowed them.

"Sounds like fun." The older man pursed his lips. "I did all the adjustments you requested and they need to be approved."

"Including the port ventral?" Joker reached down and snapped open the locking clips along his leg braces.

Adams huffed irritably. "I checked the fuel feed again, and I'm telling you there's nothing wrong with it."

"The thruster is soft."

"You're imagining things."

"I like to imagine what it'll be like when we get vivisected by a geth strike fighter because I can't roll off the starboard trim as fast as I should be able to."

"You're in a particular humor today," Adams observed.

"I just tasered a lion in the balls," Joker drawled, "it was pretty spectacular."

The engineer regarded him with a raised eyebrow. "Should I be ready for another charge into the black with half the Alliance on our heels, then?"

"Nah." Joker patted the arm of the pilot's chair. "Why worry? We live in an invisible spaceship..."

* * *

END

* * *


End file.
